On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 18:08 +0100, Mark Rogers wrote:
What is the advantage of the UUID method?
The advantage is that in some cases the device nodes can end up being pointed to different drives (say for example a laptop that gets plugged and unplugged from a docking station that has it's own drive bay, or somebody messing about with cables/adding drives in a desktop) whereas the UUID route uses the volume id of the partition so in theory you can put that drive on any controller/ any channel and (assuming grub is also configured for UUID and your BIOS will boot from any device) the machine will still work fine.
eons ago I remember I had a Dell laptop with a hotplug cdrom/floppy and I would get different drives on different device nodes depending on whether it was booted with the floppy, cdrom or 2nd battery in it's hotplug bay. UUID would have fixed this.
On a server it can probably be assumed that this isn't going to happen or if it does it will be done by someone expecting to have to deal with it.
However it would also be of particular benefit I suspect in softraid configurations and save the "ooh what order were these in again" panic
(On the rather shaky assumption that all progress is made for good reasons.)
Yeh right :)