Re: Foolproof disk device name in fstab
Quoting Frank Miles (fpm@u.washington.edu):
> On Mon, 19 Jan 2015 03:50:01 +0100, andmalc wrote:
>
> > I have a Jessie VPS with external disks attached. The disks are
> > specified in /etc/fstab with traditional /dev/sdXX naming. I recently
> > made changes to the disks that made a device name invalid but didn't
> > notice. When I rebooted, the disk couldn't be found and boot halted in
> > rescue mode.
> >
> > My question is: how can I specify devices in fstab so if they can't be
> > found boot proceeds proceeds normally instead of halting? Would
> > mounting with systemd with the 'device-timeout' option as described here
> > be a good way?
> >
> > https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fstab#Automount_with_systemd
That's a handy page that I hadn't happened upon before.
> Regardless of whether you use systemd or some other init system, using
> UUIDs is supposed to be less susceptible.
I find that LABELs are easier to use with external disks. That way I
can have partitions called lulu01, lulu02, lulu03 and lulu4 on a disk
where "lulu" is written on the outside of disk itself. (And because
I've moved internal drives between machines a fair bit, I admit to
doing the same with them.)
> You can get the proper UUIDs using blkid() (see its man page). Use of
> UUIDs is at least partially explained in the fstab man page.
... and udevadm info /dev/foo lists more than you needs to know
about disks and their partitions (or look in /run/udev/data/b8...
BTW, since moving post-wheezy, I've wondered whether man fstab
is correct in saying:
"The order of records in fstab is important because fsck(8),
mount(8), and umount(8) sequentially iterate through fstab
doing their thing."
The archlinux reference (above) seems more accurate:
"These definitions will be converted into systemd mount units
dynamically at boot, and when the configuration of the system
manager is reloaded."
Cheers,
David.
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