LABELS in RH 7.3 fstab file

[David Mandala]

The labels are on the hd in each partition. It puts them there when it
formats the drive.

But you can change to device, just remove the Label=/ and replace it
with /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda6 and all will work fine. I usually do that to
avoid problems with unpatched kernels. Red Hat patches their kernels to
use LABEL= instead of devices. Can be a pain in the tail when you build
your own kernel from pristine sources. Red Hat uses LABELS to avoid the
problems of adding more devices in the drive chain especially SCSI
devices. If you add a new SCSI device and it's id is less then the
current device it will become the current device. Say sda has a SCSI id
of 3 and you add a new SCSI drive and make it's id 2 it will become sda
and what was sda will now be sdb.

You can avoid the problem by being careful when installing new hardware
but in some machines the BIOS assigns SCSI id's and it decides what id
each device has and sometimes can change it mind! LABELS avoid the
problem.

Me I avoid labels too much hassle having to patch each kernel to work.
The patch may actually be in the 2.4 kernel series but you need to know
what option to activate and I don't.

Cheers,


Davidm

On Fri, 2002-12-13 at 16:22, Scott H wrote:
> I look in /etc/fstab on a RH7.3 server and
> discover instead of seeing /dev/whatever devices
> in the first column, there are some with "LABEL",
> e.g.:
> 
> LABEL=/    /    ext3      defaults    1 1
> 
> Where does RH keep track of these labels?  I need
> to switch /dev/sda1 which is mounted at / ,  with
> /dev/sda6 which is mounted at /backups.   (I'm
> testing a mirrored / folder to /backups for
> disaster recovery, using mirrordir)
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Scott
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> .
> 
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David IS Mandala
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