Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:If you ever change your hardware configuration (how often does that happen? once every couple of years?
Let me see, everytime a new a new Fedora, Suse, Slackware ( and now Ubuntu too) is released.
So you change your hardware each time there's new Linux distro release? May I humbly suggest donating at least some of that money to my bank account? ;-)
plus hd* names do not change when you add/remove disks)
Really? and when you add/remove partitions?
Partitions are also static (if we are talking physical partitions). /dev/hda2 is always whatever is defined in slot 2 of partition table on your primary master IDE HD. The only ones that do change are logical partitions (hda5 and up). Chances are that Linux dedicated drive will have partitions needed for booting on physical partitions.
Basically, Linux has this all disk device name thing implemented prety much in braindead and inconsistent way (one way for PATA, another way for SATA and SCSI). Solaris, for example, has much better solution. Disk device names in Solaris do not change, as long as you don't change SCSI ID of the disk, SCSI controller the disk is on, or PCI slot the controller is plugged into. It is very rare that somebody needs to change any of these properties for OS drives (unless there are problems with the controller itself). /dev/dsk/c2t3d0s2 is always /dev/dsk/c2t3d0s3, no matter how many SCSI disks and/or SCSI controllers you add or remove to/from the system (as long as you don't change SCSI ID or move it to different controller). And when you do make a change, the change of device name will reflect the change in the hardware. Because of this, Solaris doesn't need file system labels, and I never met anybody who wanted to have them on Solaris box.
you can always easily edit lilo.conf and fstab by booting into rescue mode.
So its much easier to boot in rescue mode to fix lilo.conf and fstab than to boot into rescue mode to fix the label?
That will also save you huge amount of grief if you ever connect additional disk to your box that already contains file system with "LABEL=/"
Now I must ask, how often does that happen?
I'll answer this two questions together. I don't remember when was the last time I had to boot into rescue and change device names in lilo.conf and/or fstab. However I do remember many occasions when I had to boot into rescue and change labels (that were put there by installation process) back to disk names.
Also, your swap partition can't have a label and is referenced by device name in fstab. So you'll need to edit it anyhow (or at least that was the case when I was last time bothered to check)...
The only problem I have encountered with using labels is a LVM2 related bug. Apart from that, they work perfectly in my experience.
Good for you. For me, they've been mostly pain in the butt.
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
