Rant on LABELs

[David Hollis]

On Sun, 2004-09-26 at 11:14 +0300, Marius Andreiana wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-09-25 at 16:06 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> > Just got caught again by this LABEL nonsense.
> > I was mounting my laptop hard disk on my desktop -
> > both running Fedora-
> > and the whole thing was thrown into confusion
> > because there were two partitions LABELed "/",
> > on my desktop hard disk and on the laptop hard disk.
> > 
> > I had to start again in single mode,
> > and change all the entries in /etc/fstab and /etc/grub.conf .
> That's a common problem when adding hdd's with other fedora installs.
> 
> How about generating a random integer at install time, and use it to
> label partitions like
> /_5643
> /home_5643
> /boot_5643
> ...
> and reference these in fstab / grub.conf? Could this create problems?
> 
> 
I think this would largely remove any of the benefits of labeling.  Yes,
if you have two partitions labeled "/" or "/boot", you get conflicts.
This is expected and the sysadmin should be aware of this, boot into
single user and re-label one of the partitions to something else.  Thats
just how life goes.  In other cases, it's a beautiful thing.  Now I
don't have to remember if it's /dev/hda2, /dev/sdc5, or whatever, it's
just LABEL=/.
-- 
David Hollis <dhollis at davehollis.com>