Proper way to autoload modules (/etc/rc.modules)?

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2005-04-08 at 10:40 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> > Of course we don't have to approach that, the answer is simple: Don't
> > rely on device-names and/or physical position of the hardware. Here are
> > two reason: a) users don't understand it; and b) sysadmins don't need to
> > understand it. That's why e.g. hal/fstab-sync put /media/<fslabel>
> > in /etc/fstab so you can just label your disks and expect them to be
> > mounted at the appropriate mount point.
> > 
> > I'd wish people would file bugs against software, especially desktop
> > software, that forces people to rely on device names. We need to move
> > away from that.
> 
> 1. sw-raid arrays - how do you not rely on device names when trying to
> fail-out a drive?

I believe LVM2 at least uses UUID for both physical devices (part of the
array) and logical devices itself. These UUID's are stored on the file
system.

Of course, people will be able to find examples where we do have to rely
on device names; my rant^Wpoint is that end user desktop software
expects users to understand them. That's the real bug.

> 2. adding a new disk to a system. The new disk has been a boot disk for
> another older system. Suddenly you have two partitions labeled /
> and /var. How do you get out of that w/o booting up and making fstab
> mount via device name?

Because we should use mount-by-uuid and not mount-by-label? Go file a
bug :-). Of course, people who live and swear by the command line will
now flame me because /etc/fstab will contain UUID=1234-5678-9abc-ef01
for / instead of LABEL=/.

FWIW, I've been bitten by this myself when attaching the disk from FC1
server to a running FC3 system using a USB-IDE enclosure. The bug only
occurs when rebooting the system, HAL actually gets it right and even
displays the / and /boot labels on your desktop for the with snazzy USB
icons :-)

Cheers,
David