[lug] /etc/fstab in the modern world

[David Anselmi]

P. Scott DeVos wrote:
[...]
> My problem comes in a system with a variety of hot-swappable devices 
> which I may not know at any given time to what device they are assigned. 
>  I'de like to be able to say, 'which of these many devices holds a 
> partition with a file system labelled x?'

So you replace my /dev/hda* with your list of many devices, don't you?

> Obviously mount knows how to find this information, so it probably
> isn't difficult.  In fact, I use mount to find the information now,
> but I would really like to do it without mounting and would also like
> to be able to see when two file systems have the same label.

Does mount do something smarter than iterate through devices?  What does 
mount do if there are duplicate labels?  Hmmm, looks like mount might 
use /proc/partitions--does that help you any?  I can't tell, I don't 
have a bunch of hotswap stuff.

Perhaps devfs helps you figure out your list of devices by eliminating 
unused devices.  Perhaps udev solves the labeling problem more elegantly 
(or more usefully) than e2label.  There still may be limits--you can't 
get info about a device if the driver isn't loaded, or if the device 
isn't connected/turned on/whatever.  But maybe udev helps with those as 
well.

HTH,
Dave