Re: Suggestion from a noob

[hansbkk]

2011/1/29 Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko <address@hidden>:

>But the target usercase is
> that user assigns the names based on the description of the contents
> that makes sense to him.

> Just name the disks after whatever makes sense t you, not whatever makes
> sense to GRUB, it's your disks after all.

But when you've got 18+ multi-TB drives supporting LVM layered over 6
RAID arrays, there aren't any meaningful semantics to "hang your hat
on" for partition labels.

So my current convention is to use grub's ordering - and I realize
that isn't stable, it's just more stable than most of the OS's I'm
booting into for maintenance purposes (the only time I need to try to
figure out which physical disk is which).


>> So here's my suggestion - please allow users to actually SET the
>> labels right from the grub CLI! I realize the different filesystems have 
>> different label structures,
>> but if you were able to handle say dos/ntfs plus the top four Linux
>> filesystems that should cover 99% of the needs out there.
>>
> Writing to a filesystem is always a potential risk. It has to be
> carefully evaluated to find out if it's justified. For some filesystems


Yes, I can see how the risks and dev time cost would outweigh the
benefits for most people/use cases.

So I guess I'll ask (anyone out there) again:

I currently use the following procedure to help figure out which disks
are which while in grub (for most of my servers all the disks have
identical partitioning):

Say I'm in SysRescCD - I create files in a parallel locations on each
drive with a name like "sda1-srcd" "sdb1-srcd" etc. Then when I'm in
Grml, if I notice that the ordering's different, I'll also create
"sda1-grml" "sdb1-grml"

Then I when I'm back in Grub, I use search -f on these names and jot
down the ordering, then label a series of partitions with "g201", g211
etc and use these from now on so each OS environment can have a set of
consistent mount points.

>if you've got a better suggestion than the above kludge for figuring out which 
>disk is which please fill me in!