Thanks, everybody for suggestions on how to get a debian box to NOT renumber scsi disks on bootup:
One of our sharp debian guys found a way to build an /etc/scsi-alias file that contains the scsi serial number of a disk, with entries for each disk similar to: devtype=disk,serial_number=00006496,alias=rawdsk1 Then in /etc/fstab, an entry for each disk like: /dev/scsi/rawdsk1-p1 /rawdsk1 ext2 rw 0 2 And device files need to be created in /dev/scsi/ like: brw------- 1 root root 8, 32 Nov 9 22:06 rawdsk1 brw------- 1 root root 8, 33 Nov 9 22:06 rawdsk1-p1 etc. The serial number of the disk was found by: scsiinfo -s /dev/scsi/<whatever> or by: scsiinfo -s /dev/sdX Our unix guy also had to write an /etc/init.d/scsidev from scratch, and copy /usr/sbin/scsidev to /sbin/scsidev, so that scsidev can be run before /usr is mounted. This seems to work ok, with the disks being assigned the correct id on reboots. Great thanks to the guy who figured this out!! Dave > > Dave Felt wrote: > > 2. My debian box has several scsi disks on it, and if one is turned off > > at boot time, the machine mounts the wrong disks on the defined > > filesystems, even though they are listed correctly in /etc/fstab. Is > > there a way to force the machine to mount a given disk on a given > > filesystem? Thanks! > Ethan Benson wrote: > i was looking at the fstab(5) man page the other day and noticed that > you can specify instead of /dev/* a filesystem UUID or label, (which > ext2 has) and the disks will be searched for a matching filesystem. > this is intended to get away from the problem of changing /dev/ > nodes. i don't know if it actually works or not, it could very well > be unimplemented.