Accessing disks via their serial numbers.

[Peter Jeremy]

On Mon, 2006-Jun-26 18:46:19 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>>> 4.	It prevents cold-state swapout of disk drives.
>>
>>Why?
>
>Because /etc/fstab contains the serial number of the disk you just
>junked and the new one has a different serial number.

I've used a couple of OSs that derived their logical disk name (ie
/dev/disk/dsk5) from the WWID by keeping a magic database to map
the WWID to the name.  None of them have good solutions to telling
the OS that WWID-x has died and I want WWID-y to now map to the same
logical device as WWID-x used to.

Actually having the WWID (or similar) as the logical name would make
handling a disk swap really nasty.

Stating that the sysadmin knows about the change doesn't address the
issue:  The sysadmin changed the device because the old one failed.
There may or may not have been advance notice of the replacement.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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