Linux is not about choice [was Re: Fedora too cutting edge?]

[Andrew Farris]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Andrew Farris wrote:
>> Anaconda should have handled changing your configuration change in 
>> /etc/fstab for you at install if all your partitions were labeled.
> 
> When does anaconda run?  I want to be able to install an OS, then add 
> disks or move them.  Right now a machine by my desktop has 2 scsi and 8 
> sata drives in hot-swap bays plus an assortment of pluggable firewire 
> and USB external drives, and only the scsi pair were installed when 
> anaconda ran.  I'd much, much prefer that the raw devices for the 
> swappable bays always had fixed device names for the drive inserted by 
> position regardless of insertion order but I realize that's not likely 
> to happen, so I'll settle for a reasonable description of how to figure 
> out the right name for a newly inserted drive with the understanding 
> that it may not have a filesystem lable and I may not want to mount it. 
>  At the moment, the most likely thing I'd want to do is add a partition 
> from a newly inserted disk to an existing md array, but at some point in 
> the setup (and not while anaconda is running...) it is necessary to 
> partition and build the arrays out of a bunch of disks that mostly look 
> the same.  Is fedora suitable for jobs like this?

Well in that particular situation where you know when the disk is inserted and 
you can do them one at a time it should be easily determined which device nodes 
are assigned just by 'tail -F /var/log/messages' prior to the disk insertion. 
I'd agree thats not exactly as elegant as the assumption that the device will 
consistently be assigned a certain device node but it works.  When the disk is 
inserted the kernel messages very clearly identify it if a usable disk is found 
whether it is partitioned or not.

You can also just look into /dev/disk/by-id for links that give you the device 
if you know which id is which (and if only one of the disks inserted doesn't 
have partitions you know which it is immediately).  /dev/disk/by-path even tells 
you the controller you're connected to for each device node (with the caviat 
that it calls them all scsi, but primary controller to secondary controller 
should still make sense).  That gives you all you should need to handle those 
disk management jobs...

If thats still just not how you want it to be, thats understandable I suppose.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> <ajfarris at gmail.com>
  gpg 0xC99B1DF3 fingerprint CDEC 6FAD BA27 40DF 707E A2E0 F0F6 E622 C99B 1DF3
No one now has, and no one will ever again get, the big picture. - Daniel Geer
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