[plug] Statically Mounting USB Drives

[Daniel Pittman]

Gavin Chester <gavin.chester at gmail.com> writes:
> On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 11:50 +1000, Daniel Pittman wrote:
>
>> Using a persistent name rather than a hardware name makes your system
>> independent of that renumbering, and makes you happier in the long
>> run.
>
> Not always :-(
>
> Initially ignorant of the new schema of persistent names, I had issues
> with swapping drives and scsi controller cards earlier this year where
> the whole system was unbootable because grub + fstab no longer saw _all_
> and _exactly_ the same named drives that the system originally ran. 

Sorry, I don't quite follow.  The way I read that is:

You changed the order of drives and controllers, so changed the
non-persistent (/dev/sd*) names.

You then had problems because grub and your fstab configuration didn't
match what was expected, resulting in a non-booting system.

> I decided that persistent naming was more trouble than worth, for me.

You then decided that the problem that the persistent naming tools were
intended to solve was more trouble than benefit.

> Now I have to remember to force non-persistent naming in my fstab
> setup since opensuse has adopted it as default.

So, now you carefully ensure that the same problem will occur again next
time you change the order of detection.


Clearly, my reading is wrong somewhere, because that interpretation
really doesn't make much sense.  Can you clarify?


Oh, and it would be nice to know what the actual problem that caused the
system to be unbootable was -- was it grub or the fstab related boot
process that failed?  How, and why?  What did you need to do to recover
that?

Given the description at hand I can't really comment one way or the
other -- without any detail this is nothing but an assertion, and an
unarguable one, because I don't doubt you had problems, but I don't know
they had anything to do with the persistent device names.

Regards,
        Daniel