Fedora 15 + scsi tape drive

[Cameron Simpson]

On 14Oct2011 23:31, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
| > Older Linux kernels carried along the SCSI ID as the device name,
| 
| No, Linux always assigned SCSI devices in order from the start (e.g.
| sda, sg0, sr0, st0).  Assigning with the ID was always something
| controversial, because on one hand, it would have given fixed device
| names (when that was desired for the more "enterprise-level" SCSI, when
| IDE always used hda for primary master, hdb for primary slave, etc.),
| while on the other, there weren't enough device major/minor numbers (and
| that assignment style never handled multiple buses or HBAs) to actually
| do that.
| 
| Other OSes did it different, but not Linux, and certainly not any Fedora
| version (as the OP said).  I'm pretty sure the only way Fedora would
| have had st4 without st[0-3] would have been if there was a udev rule to
| rename it.

Yes, and this has _long_ been a major annoyance to me.
Add a drive? Other drives get renamed!
Add a bus (eg new PCI SCSI card)? Other drives get renamed!

I've got a machine at home whose / drive gets renamed depending  on
whether the PCI SCSI RAID stuff is broken or not. Hmm, shall root be on
sdb or sdc today? Maddening when trying to rescue.

I'm all ok with providing sda/hda as discovered, _provided_ one also has
nice bus/id type names as well. Solaris' bus/id/partition drive names
looked long and complicated but they were reliable - you could look at
the device ids and know what the OS would call them.

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
- Haiku Error Messages http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/chal/1998/02/10chal2.html