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@(protected)>
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

--
gentoo-user@(protected)