Re: Switching to by-label mounting of partitions
On Mon, May 04, 2009 at 08:52:17PM +0100, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> When using d-i on my sparc box I have to use the firmware loading feature
> in order to make the firmware for the SCSI controller available to the
> installer, otherwise the disks are not detected. A minor annoyance is that
> once you insert the USB flash drive with firmware, it's assigned 'sda' as
> as a device name, and then the real disk gets 'sdb'. This causes problems
> later, as /dev/sdb2 is listed as root device in /etc/fstab and /etc/silo.conf.
> If one tries to boot without the flash drive inserted later, the real
> disk is recognized as 'sda' instead of 'sdb', causing a boot failure, as
> the filesystem cannot be found.
> Today I tried to set the labels in the installer, and then manually edit
> /etc/fstab and /etc/silo.conf at the end of installation, specifying the
> devices by LABEL instead of device name. It appears to work fine, you
> only need to quote the value for root put in silo.conf like this:
> root="LABEL=root"
> As the amount of users who are using the firmware loading feature is probably
> non-negligible, it would be cool to get the installer to assign labels
> by default to all partitions, and generate the /etc/fstab and bootloader
> configs using labels. What do you think?
Assigning labels is fine. Using them by default in /etc/fstab is not; this
would cause problems any time you add a second Debian disk to a system
(e.g., for recovery purposes). This should be done using the UUIDs instead,
which I believe is the plan that's been discussed.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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