A FC6 suggestion.

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 23:15, Michael A. Peters wrote:
> > 
> > Assume you are in the IT dept for some group and you are used
> > to being able to re-use disks in different machines and to
> > recover data from any disk by installing/mounting in any working
> > machine.  Now you find that any combination of disks from
> > default fedora/RH/Centos installs won't boot...  It is a
> > problem.
> 
> Put it in a USB2 housing.
> Then it doesn't matter - FC5 doesn't use fstab when mounting a USB disk
> (well, I haven't tried connected at boot). It doesn't use the LABEL
> either.
> 
> Mounts just fine - even if another disk with that LABEL exists -
> allowing you to do all the recovery you want.
> 
> Yes, I've done this.

Most of the ones I swap are SCA (scsi w/hot swap connector).
But, the other quirk is that I very often clone these
machines by dd'ing the entire drive, so no matter how
clever you are about creating unique labels there will
be duplicates when the raw disk is copied.  What we
need are some management tools so you have standard
procedures to clone machines across linux distributions
instead of every distro re-inventing its own quirky
workaround for the scsi device naming problem and
hiding MAC addresses in obscure config files.

Unfortunately no one seems to be interested in that kind
of cooperation.  If a disto does add something it wants it
to be unique to their version and a reason to use only
that version.  However, I'm not interested in being married
to only one distribution so I stick to dd / tar and the
things that work everywhere and simply complain about
the way different unix flavors have always kept their
differences to the detriment of acceptance.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com