I had cause to reboot my gentoo box this morning, and it was an unexpected disaster. For some reason, my two PCI-X SATA controllers decided to switch places in the /dev/sd* lists. My /etc/fstab had explicit drive paths hard-coded, and they tried to mount stuff that didn't exist, and naturally failed. I wound up in a root shell under instructions to clean this up.
I decided to go with UUIDs in /etc/fstab. After a half-hour or so pfutzing around with these (how do you find the UUID of an unmounted partition when you're not even really sure what kind of filesystem it has), I got everything to mount with "mount -a", and I rebooted. The drives had changed names again, the sort of thing that UUIDs were designed to deal with, but the mount command was stubbornly using the old names. Bootup failed and I was back in a root shell. Thank goodness my root directory is still on an HDA drive. But where did these names come from -- they weren't in /etc/fstab any more. I did a system call trace on mount(1) to find out. There's a file I never heard of or noticed before: /etc/blkid.tab, and a backup, that seem to override the UUIDs, putting us back in the world we were in before Labels and UUIDs. Grrrr. I can get a good boot if I rm blkid.tab and its backup before I shut down. So: 1) Can I disable blkid.tab? In the presence of UUIDs this seems sensible. 2) Does anyone know if labels are also defeated? I don't feel like rebooting any more today just to find out. 3) Can we just stop this madness somehow? ++ kevin -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD -- [email protected] mailing list
