Hi Rick, Sounds like you're doing things similar to what I've been doing and want to continue doing. We also treat USB storage the same way. (Don't think I've =ever= booted up with an external USB drive or USB memstick connected.) You make it sound like you ONLY edit /etc/fstab But when I first got advice on how to edit my boot files (probably from a Linux boot-up contributor, if memory serves) he said I had to edit... /etc/fstab /etc/default/grub /usr/share/grub/grub-mkconfig_lib =and= /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume (or wherever they were located ~10 years ago). Maybe you've been treading on thin ice and didn't know it? Maybe he was being overly cautious? Maybe things have changed in the intervening years? Cheers, Carl On 23/04/14 13:51, Rick Moen wrote:
Quoting Carl Turney (carl@boms.com.au):
Hadn't ever experienced sda and sdb changing assignments in my system -- except one period years ago when the pin contacts on my IDE/PATA caddies got a bit wonky.
Nor I.
I am guessing that the 'sda and sdb changing assignments' occurs in one of a couple of scenarios:
1. At the time of adding or removing drives from an otherwise stable set of fixed main-storage drive devices.
2. When leaving USB-connected drives connected through reboots.
USB-connectable drives are handy, but IMO are completely unsuitable for use as main storage. E.g., I attach and detach a USB-connectable external 2TB drive to my server at home, to archive filesets. When done each time, I detach the drive and store it at the far end of my lot, so if the house burns down, the fire can't burn my archive file copies.
So, the USB drive is always /dev/sdd, the next drive up from my three SCSI hard drives. Because it's not present during booting, it cannot even in theory grab /dev/sda away from the SCSI ID0 drive.
That scenario aside, yeah, if you decide to kludge in a new PATA, or SAS, or SATA, or old-SCSI drive to your existing chains -- or remove one of the drives, your /dev/sdX may shuffle a bit in a fairly predictable way that is essentially a one-time shift. At which time, you make the very obvious adjustment to /etc/fstab, and you're done.
To put that another way, adjusting /etc/fstab is just the price of adding or removing physical drives from your main storage. You need to do that even if using UUIDs; all using /dev/sdX adds is the possibility you might need to edit some existing entries on the same one-time basis, too.
Also, I know what /dev/sda _is_. Yay, clarity.
So, on my system, those UUID lines get banished to ghastly comment lines way at the bottom of /etc/fstab and never used - the replacement lines using /dev/sdX instead.
I reserve the right to change my mind if, say, I use Thunderbolt or Firewire devices as main storage and their /dev/sdX names keep changing. In my present use scenario, UUIDs are an ugly solution to a non-existent problem.
Your Mileage May Differ.[tm]
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