Re: drive labels --- update to my previous post
On 20120706_225838, cletusjenkins wrote:
> >
> > I add one line to /etc/fstab for each labeled usb external drive like
> > the following:
> >
> > LABEL=gflx1 /media/gflx1 ext3 rw,user,noauto 0 0
> >
> > And I create the named mount point in /media with:
> >
> > mkdir /media/gflx1
> >
> > I have my own system of choosing label values
> > <mnemonic-letter-group><digits>, but you can create your own
> > system. (gflx is a contraction of Seagate GoFlex) Don't try to use
> > labels that are informative of the contents of the drive. You can
> > easily maintian a text database of <label> <contents>. If you choose
> > to have the label never change, then the extra work of adding a line
> > to /etc/fstab is done only once when a new device is originally
> > acquired and adds very little to the drill of writing and ext3 file
> > system onto the partition Avoid giving two devices the same LABEL. The
> > text database is a good aid in this.
> >
> > Its also a good idea to write the LABEL on a stickum label and place
> > the stickum label on the device.
> >
> > HTH
> > --
> > Paul E Condon
> > pecondon@mesanetworks.net
>
> Thanks for your reply. I never thought of trying to specify these drives in the fstab file. I would have thought that doing so would hose-up the auto-mounter. But I'll give it a try.
>
> These are little 1TB drives that get their power via the USB cable, so the first thing I do when I get one is slap an old VHS label (the one for the top of the tape not the long one for the edge) on the back of the drive to catalog what it is for. I haven't bought a VHS tape in at least 9 years, but like a mental patient I've kept every single extra label I ever bought for every single type of media I've used. I even have extra labels for the 8" floppies I used with a mini-computer my school had.
>
Since writing about my way of dealing with pluggable drives things
have changed in a puzzling way:
I was forced to reinstall Squeeze because of a worsening instability
and kernel oops events on the computer that I use for backups. With
the new install things behave differently, very differently. Now
there are no lines in /etc/fstab mentioning devices /dev/usb1 ,
etc. and the computer recognizes and mounts usb drives in /media
without an special lines supplied by me. It creates the mount point
dynamically, and deletes the mount point when I do umount
/media/gflx1. In a way, it behaves as if I had written a udev script,
but I don't remember doing that, so I hypothesize that the packager of
some debian package added such a script to his/her package (which
package that is, I do not know).
Now the behavior seems to be that any device that has a partition
label will be mounted under /media using the partition label string as
a mount point name. I don't have any unlabeled devices so I can't
easily discover the behavior for an unlabeled device. Some kind and
talented person seems to have fixed the problem. I'm inclined to
believe that one can have the new, better behavior without doing a
full re-install. Perhaps this post will prompt some to contribute the
name of the package whose config files need up-grading. Then you can
get this behavior without going thru the pain that I went thru.
Also, the behavior that I described in my earlier post really did
exist once-upon-a-time, but not any more, so readers of the archives
should not waste their time trying to repeat what I reported. It
isn't true anymore. I don't know what package change made it go
away, and don't have the forensic skills to have a hope of finding
out. The new behavior is better. I really don't want to go back.
About old stickum labels: They lose their stickiness if one stores
them in a place without proper climate control. Too hot, too cold,
or too damp, and they become useless within just a few years ;-/
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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