Re: How to obtain UUID of drives (squeeze udev lacks vol_id)
On 20100322_175115, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 2010-03-22 17:05, Paul E Condon wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> >You answered my question --- I didn't know about blkid utility.
> >With this one can give every partition a meaningful labels like ---
> >
> >LABEL="hda1"
> >
> >or whatever is displayed as the system device one one runs blkid
> >without options in order to get a full listing. e.g.
> >cmpq:~# blkid
> >/dev/hda1: UUID="990189bc-f7ce-41a6-9d8f-64a35349875e" TYPE="ext3"
> >/dev/hda2: LABEL="HDA2" UUID="5a02e986-8aa3-4790-aa3f-41f7f565533f"
> >TYPE="ext3" /dev/hda3: LABEL="HDA3"
> >UUID="63025622-0210-49d4-89ff-f038e6c218b6" TYPE="ext3" /dev/hda5:
> >TYPE="swap" /dev/hda6: LABEL="HDA6"
> >UUID="12148027-bc0b-4260-853e-64a8d79c6fe7" TYPE="ext3" /dev/hdb1:
> >UUID="29b36e91-32e7-46bd-b8d3-831f5dcbd337" TYPE="ext3" /dev/sda1:
> >LABEL="WDMB-1" UUID="bc1d2170-d790-4952-bbee-c3c3efdd8413"
> >TYPE="ext3" /dev/sdb1: LABEL="WDP-5"
> >UUID="8c6c3be3-4a72-45cd-929f-2dec9f185427" TYPE="ext3"
>
> Gah!!! "HDAn" are *horrible* labels.
>
> When you add another hard drive, the kernel might make it hda and
> your existing drive hdb. Or libata might convert them to sdx and
> then you'd have sda2 with label HDA2. *Very* unintuitive!
For me, linux device names have become very intuitive. Certainly more
intuitive than UUIDs. I've been thinking about UUIDs for a little over
a week. To me, the idea of UUIDs suffers from a great excess of
pseudo-intellectual baggage. A convention for naming things that is
deliberately designed to generate names that give no clue as to what
the thing is, or which one of several similar things this one actually
is --- is crazy.
The HDXn convention tells me which metal-box-thing I have to pull out
of the computer box and replace, if Debian/GNU/Linux informs me that
this particular HDXn is broken. I like that.
I know this doesn't work for USB which has SCSI derived names. For
this I have been using labels for removeable drives. I have no
permanently installed USB drives, but I expect that when I do, I
will label them with some conventional names that can be put on
a sticker that is stuck on the physical thing.
>
> Or you might need to move the drive to a machine that already has a
> partition labeled HDA2.
If I need to move a drive to another machine, I will use blkid on
that machine to inspect the drive before I compose the new line
that will be needed in /etc/fstab. This saves some time. If
blkid can't report the labels on the HD, there is little hope of
mounting it and little point in it having a distinct ID.
>
> Give them meaningful *symbolic* names.
>
> >This is from a system that is running Lenny. Note that the swap partition doesn't
> >have either a label or a uuid, but I had specified labels each time I installed
> >a distro.
> >
>
> That's weird.
>
> --
> "History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak
> or the timid." Dwight Eisenhower
>
>
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--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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