On Tuesday 22 April 2008, Mick wrote: > On Monday 21 April 2008, Mark Knecht wrote: > > On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 2:22 PM, Neil Bothwick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:41:58 +0200, Dirk Heinrichs wrote: > > > > The other possible way would be to give your devices unique > > > > names, either via udev or by using LVM. Advantage over UUIDs: > > > > much easier to read. > > > > > > Or you could use filesystem labels. > > > > I've used filesystem labels for a long time and generally it works > > really well. Only problem I've had is my Dad's machine has a Maxtor > > 1-touch 1394 drive. It seems that often it doesn't get recognized > > by the 1394 subsystem fast enough to satisfy whatever requirements > > the Gentoo scripts have for the label being readable so it doesn't > > reliably get recognized every time. > > I have thought about using labels, but never really ventured into it > (I think I tried it once on a server). Can I do it retrospectively > on ext2, reiserfs and xfs, or is it going to erase the contents of > the partition?
No, it's safe. The various file system tools have a *label* or *tune* tool to add a label to the fs metadata. Then simply update fstab. The fun starts in finding the tool for your filesystems. ext2/3 is easy - it's e2label. ReiserFS is a little more obscure :-) Finding this amazing Reiser tool is left as an exercise for the reader (i.e. I can never remember what it is myself and am too damn lazy to go and look right now) Personally, I prefer labels over other disk id methods. I get to choose the label myself and can ensure they are unique in my world (but maybe not in the universe like UUIDs are). If I have to mkfs a volume from scratch for some reason, it's easier for me to to re-use the same label than to re-use or copy-paste those long UUID strings -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
