Re: A curse on LABEL=

Timothy Murphy wrote:

William Hooper wrote:

I understand the supposed advantage of LABEL
if one is changing a hard disk,
but I just feel the confusion it causes vastly outweighs its merits.
Am I alone in this?

Try adding a new SCSI controller to a system that moves all existing SCSI
devices. You will like LABEL then.

Surely the proportion of users who want to do this is vanishingly small?
I imagine < 5% have SCSI main disk, and of these <1% ever want to change the controller.
(Actually I have a SCSI-only machine;
but it has never occured to me to change the controller,
and I would certainly expect trouble if I did.)

But as I said, I understand that the LABEL feature helps
a very small number of users.
I'm just saying that it inconveniences a vastly greater number.

Give him a break Timothy.

I have never had any difficulty changing controllers on servers with as many as 10 drives. I find labels to be of limited use, and usualy modify fstab to remove them after I install. But that is my prerogative, I have been working with Unix Sytems for 18 years, and I prefer to use fstab without labels.

From what I can tell the only advantage of labels is that you don't have

to plan a hard drive or partition change as carefully. The main problem using labels is that it gives you a false sense that you don't have to plan to move a hard drive or partition, and in some cases it takes extra work because you have to relabel a partition before you move it or it may conflict when moved.

I currently have an R&D machine with 8 drives and about 15 partitions.
On that machine labels have been both a blessing and a curse at different times when moving data and mount points around. I could live without them, but they are likely here to stay, so we will just have to get used to them.