Re: Unpredictable drive naming with multiple SATA controllers

["agenkin@gmail.com" <agenkin@gmail.com>]

On Mar 18, 9:10 pm, Rich Healey <healey.r...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think he means he wants to map a device node to a device _location_
> not a specific device, which happens by default with ide (ie, hda being
> ide primary master).
>
> using fstab with uuid's would mean that the same physical disk always
> mounts to the same place, which is of no use if he swaps a new disk with
> the same data as the old one (so would want to mount it in the same place)
>
> Please tell me if this is not what you meant.

Perhaps I wasn't clear, I'll try to restate the problem. :)

We have thirteen drive bays with removable SATA disks in a box used
for backups.  The bays are marked 1 through 13, and mount to /backup/
drive01 .. drive13.  Sometimes we replace some of the disks with new
ones (e.g. to store the old ones for long-term off-line backups), and
we want the replaced disk accessible at the same mount point as the
old disk.  The newly inserted disks will have a different UUID, and,
should we use UUIDs, the operation will require reconfiguring the host
to mount the new drives, which is a hassle.

In essence, we would like to be able to address partitions like it's
done in a BSD-derived Unix.  For example, in Solaris /dev/dsk/c1t4d5s7
means "controller 1 target 4 disk 5 slice 7".  Doesn't have to be the
same syntax, of course, but we'd like to be able to reliably address a
disk, connected to specific hardware address (a port of a SATA card).

Thanks!