About /etc/fstab and LABELs

[Ed Wilts]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 11:39:29AM -0500, Chris St. Pierre wrote:
> I've often wondered, is there any real advantage to using labels
> instead of physical device names?  David, you mentioned that it's to
> avoid using the device names, but I've never found that to be a
> particularly burdensome task, or something I'd like to avoid.  What's
> the gain from using labels?

Labels can save you from MAJOR problems in a lot of specific situations.
Imagine that you have 3 disks, sda, sdb, and sdc.  Now imagine that sdb
fails hard.  You reboot and what was sdc is now sdb.  You will mount
that filesystem on the wrong mount point and suddenly cause yourself all
sorts of grief and possible disk corruption depending on how well
behaved your applications are.  Imagine that sdb was your backup drive
and you did an rsync --delete from sda to sdb automatically via cron or
in rc.local.  Kiss all the data that was on sdc goodbye.

Use labels - they're there to help you.

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program