file system mount

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2007-11-02 at 14:47 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> David Zeuthen wrote:
> 
> >> How about giving a hint as to which _physical_ disk it is?  Imagine you 
> >> had a couple of scsi controllers each with a bunch of disks, plus some 
> >> sata and USB volumes and you add one (which might currently have labels 
> >> that match other drives) and want to format it.  Which one is it?  Or a 
> >> drive in the system fails and isn't detected.  How do you find which one
> >> it was?
> > 
> > You mean like showing "/ (/dev/sdb1)" instead of "/"? It's doable..
> 
> No - sdb1 tells me what order the OS detected it it.  It says nothing 
> about the physical connection or even which controller is involved. 
> Does anyone actually use this system with a large number of disks that 
> sometimes need attention?  If the drive that was sdb yesterday fails in 
> a way that keeps it from being detected, sdb will mean something else 
> after a reboot.

Of course. That's why we show the LABEL right now. We could show the
UUID but that's fugly. Btw, have you tried installing the RPM
gnome-mount-nautilus-properties, right clicking the icon and choose
Properties?

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gm-n-p-1.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gm-n-p-2.png

This UI needs to be reworked to work better for enterprise use cases but
basically does the job of properly identifying the drive...

> Same general rant about not being able to tell/control what is really 
> going on.  I don't like the system to guess, especially when I know the 
> answer will likely be wrong.

No one is doing any guessing here; we just display the LABEL of the file
system. If you happen to have useless and/or multiple labels you get to
keep them :-)

Please keep in mind this discussion is about what to show on the
desktop. Which means that it needs to work for a lot of people and
displaying scary stuff like UUID, device files is, generally, not going
to work I think. At least not in GNOME. Hence, we need a dedicated UI
for this - like gnome-disk-utility that I pointed you to in the other
mail. Someone just needs to finish it so it's ready for Fedora.

> > I'm simply just asking the Anaconda to a) use UUID instead of LABEL (if
> > applicable; e.g. some FS's don't have UUID); and b) use some sane labels
> > by default. The user is still free to edit /etc/fstab to use LABEL=
> > instead of UUID= and/or relabel his drives or do whatever he wants.
> 
> And similarly, I'd like a way to peg these to physical 
> controller/cable/drive selects because the UUIDs and labels are all 
> going to be the same on disks that I've cloned with DD or letting 
> RAID1's rebuild.  I know you can't on USB, but about everything else has 
> a controller/target/LUN concept to identify it.

Sure, that's something gnome-disk-utility should do. But it needs work
until it's ready.

     David