Re: How to obtain UUID of drives (squeeze udev lacks vol_id)
Hi Paul,
> 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.
I agree, HDXn is certainly easy to understand and it gives a sys admin
more transparent view into the system which also allows him/her to
react to the emergency situation with better speed. What is more is
that this is yet another example where MS windows people would not
move from their click, drag and drop approach as to convince them that
this is a better way to do it would be very hard.
Anyway what is this UUID business all about? If its is so great to use
multiple character strings of complete gibberish to name a partition
so why is it not done somewhere on the lower kernel level and make
this process completely transparent on the user level?
lubo
On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Paul E Condon
<pecondon@mesanetworks.net> wrote:
> 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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