On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 08:20:14AM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
> Matej Cepl wrote:
>> On 2008-11-20, 07:00 GMT, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>> Maybe - but it isn't a real solution. You still have to deal with
>>> identifying the device before and during the labeling process. If
>>> you can do that, you didn't really need the label.
>>
>> Sorry, maybe I don't understand, but what's so difficult on the
>> following?
>>
>> tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 |awk '/UUID/ {print $3}'
>>
>
> The disk may be unformatted at this point and not have a UUID.
I know it is bad form to follow up to my own posting, but I think I've
been making my argument in the wrong way so far. I'm not really against
changes in the way things are done or even the details of those changes
as long as they are exposed somehow. What I am against is hiding those
changes in anaconda or other parts of the installer process so that the
only reasonable way to build several machines is to automate the way you
interact with anaconda with another tool like cobbler, and after it is
built you can't change anything.
We need a way to do the things that only anaconda knows how to do at
times other than the initial install. For example, you want to move a
working system disk to another machine, or replace the booting disk
controller, or restore your backups onto a similar system. Or clone a
bunch of copies of the same boot/system disk and expect them to run in
different machines. It doesn't really matter how this is accomplished,
just that there is a plan for it and hopefully it doesn't involve a
human needing to know every possible thing that anaconda knows about
hardware. Could there be a way to re-run anaconda after moving a
system to new hardware and do an automatic fix-up?
I thought good disks had built-in UUIDs in the firmware (perhaps this
is only for Fibre Channel). Or you could use the serial number which
shows up under "smartctl -a" to identify physical disks. And some
fancy disk shelves have "identify disk" commands which blinks some LED
on the front of the disk.
Once you know which physical disk is the one you want, you can clone
to that disk and then reset the UUIDs or LABELs to unique values.