A curse on LABEL=

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Sat, 2004-04-10 at 19:51, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> How exactly would adding a new DVD drive stop the computer booting?

You open your computer.  You pop the DVD drive in.  Cables don't reach,
so you move some around.  Your boot drive now has a different device
number under Linux which, if you're not using something like LABEL in
/etc/fstab, will render your machine unable to boot.

> And how exactly do LABELs assist if you add a new hard disk?

In much the same way.  Let's say you have a Firewire drive for all of
your photos, which you leave permanently attached.  You run out of
space, buy a new drive, plug it into the USB2 port.  This can cause the
device number of your Firewire drive to change, which means that unless
you're using a LABEL-like scheme, any filesystems on that drive won't
get mounted.

	<b