About /etc/fstab and LABELs

[Kostas Sfakiotakis]

Greetings David

David Tonhofer, m-plify S.A. wrote:

>> Could you explain what those LABELs are, and more specifically what 
>> creates
>> them and how does it map them to phsyical disk partitions?
>
>
> Hi,
>
> They are just strings that are supposed to avoid the need to have
> the device names in the fstab. 


Well actually they are used because the actual devices names can't be
used . There is no way ( found yet at least ) that anaconda can know the
actual device names for everyone .

For example i might choose to have /dev/hda2 as my root device ,
while you David ( for example again ) might choose to have /dev/hdc1
as your root device , so what would anaconda use as root device ?
This is where LABELS fit , so you have a LABEL= /root  and the
installation procedure gets simplified .

> To create them you use 'e2label'.
> As the name implies, this trick only works with ext2/ext3 filesystems.

Well it is safe to say in with ext2 filesystems , since an ext3 filesystem
is an ext2 filesystem with a journal ( ref. mke2fs -j .... )

Kind Regards,
   Kostas