Re: [gentoo-user] OT: Question re: UUID

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tuesday 22 April 2008, Mick wrote:
> On Monday 21 April 2008, Mark Knecht wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 2:22 PM, Neil Bothwick <neil@××××××××××.uk>
wrote:
> > > On Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:41:58 +0200, Dirk Heinrichs wrote:
> > >  > The other possible way would be to give your devices unique
> > >  > names, either via udev or by using LVM. Advantage over UUIDs:
> > >  > much easier to read.
> > >
> > >  Or you could use filesystem labels.
> >
> > I've used filesystem labels for a long time and generally it works
> > really well. Only problem I've had is my Dad's machine has a Maxtor
> > 1-touch 1394 drive. It seems that often it doesn't get recognized
> > by the 1394 subsystem fast enough to satisfy whatever requirements
> > the Gentoo scripts have for the label being readable so it doesn't
> > reliably get recognized every time.
>
> I have thought about using labels, but never really ventured into it
> (I think I tried it once on a server).  Can I do it retrospectively
> on ext2, reiserfs and xfs, or is it going to erase the contents of
> the partition?

No, it's safe. The various file system tools have a *label* or *tune* 
tool to add a label to the fs metadata. Then simply update fstab.

The fun starts in finding the tool for your filesystems. ext2/3 is 
easy - it's e2label. ReiserFS is a little more obscure :-) Finding this 
amazing Reiser tool is left as an exercise for the reader (i.e. I can 
never remember what it is myself and am too damn lazy to go and look 
right now)

Personally, I prefer labels over other disk id methods. I get to choose 
the label myself and can ensure they are unique in my world (but maybe 
not in the universe like UUIDs are). If I have to mkfs a volume from 
scratch for some reason, it's easier for me to to re-use the same label 
than to re-use or copy-paste those long UUID strings

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

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