On Fri, 2007-11-02 at 14:47 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
David Zeuthen wrote:
>> How about giving a hint as to which _physical_ disk it is? Imagine you
>> had a couple of scsi controllers each with a bunch of disks, plus some
>> sata and USB volumes and you add one (which might currently have labels
>> that match other drives) and want to format it. Which one is it? Or a
>> drive in the system fails and isn't detected. How do you find which one
>> it was?
>
> You mean like showing "/ (/dev/sdb1)" instead of "/"? It's
doable..
No - sdb1 tells me what order the OS detected it it. It says nothing
about the physical connection or even which controller is involved.
Does anyone actually use this system with a large number of disks that
sometimes need attention? If the drive that was sdb yesterday fails in
a way that keeps it from being detected, sdb will mean something else
after a reboot.
Of course. That's why we show the LABEL right now. We could show the
UUID but that's fugly. Btw, have you tried installing the RPM
gnome-mount-nautilus-properties, right clicking the icon and choose
Properties?
http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gm-n-p-1.png
http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gm-n-p-2.png
This UI needs to be reworked to work better for enterprise use cases but
basically does the job of properly identifying the drive...
Same general rant about not being able to tell/control what is really
going on. I don't like the system to guess, especially when I know the
answer will likely be wrong.
No one is doing any guessing here; we just display the LABEL of the file
system. If you happen to have useless and/or multiple labels you get to
keep them :-)
Please keep in mind this discussion is about what to show on the
desktop. Which means that it needs to work for a lot of people and
displaying scary stuff like UUID, device files is, generally, not going
to work I think. At least not in GNOME. Hence, we need a dedicated UI
for this - like gnome-disk-utility that I pointed you to in the other
mail. Someone just needs to finish it so it's ready for Fedora.
> I'm simply just asking the Anaconda to a) use UUID instead
of LABEL (if
> applicable; e.g. some FS's don't have UUID); and b) use some sane labels
> by default. The user is still free to edit /etc/fstab to use LABEL=
> instead of UUID= and/or relabel his drives or do whatever he wants.
And similarly, I'd like a way to peg these to physical
controller/cable/drive selects because the UUIDs and labels are all
going to be the same on disks that I've cloned with DD or letting
RAID1's rebuild. I know you can't on USB, but about everything else has
a controller/target/LUN concept to identify it.
Sure, that's something gnome-disk-utility should do. But it needs work
until it's ready.
David