Re: question about fstab in squeeze and uuid

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:53:35 -0800, Freeman wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 08:16:48PM +0000, Camaleón wrote:

(...)

>> Well, that said I like Lenny still uses the old scheme "/dev/sdx". At
>> least if it changes, I still understand it better than the new udev
>> naming :-)
>> 
>> 
> I've been changing to labels with squeeze. The up side: it is a hard
> designation and can be made unique.
> 
> The collisions part is unclear to me. If one plugs into USB a drive from
> another machine, won't that just be listed in /dev by sdx, at which
> point it can have its fstab edited?

USB devices usually auto-fall under /media and do not need to be added 
in /etc/fstab, unless you want to use them as permanent mount points.

But if the USB hard drive already has a label, and that label shares its 
name with another mounted device, it will generate a "collision". Nothing 
serious, I guess that when you plugged the USB drive it would have told 
you something like "mount point '/media/mylabel' already exists" and 
aborts.

I mean, the success of mounting a device "by label" will depend on 
whether the user knows before hand if the device:

a) Already has a label defined
b) What is that label to prevent collisions with other devices

So, in order to avoid that, distribution installers defaults to either 
UUID and/or ID for use it in /etc/fstab which tends to be a more secure 
approach.
 
> I typo-ed the label for my root partition on my last fstab update but it
> mounted anyway as rootfs in mtab.  So I put rootfs in fstab and it has
> been working. :-/

Strange behaviour, indeed. Maybe you could had find more information 
about that under /var/log/dmesg :-?

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón