moorning martin: thanks for responding. apologies for not thinking to ask on debian-user earlier, and apologies for the long-winded style: just got ddragged out of bed to go chase a lamb out of the garden that was eating our flowers and vegetables. if i wasn't stumbling about half-asleep or concerned for our future food supply i'd find a lamb head-butting fence posts incredibly funny.
On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 8:26 PM, martin f krafft <madd...@debian.org> wrote: > also sprach Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <luke.leigh...@gmail.com> > [2011.06.25.1938 +0200]: >> mdadm i can confirm goes and hunts down the symlinks and adds >> /dev/sdd! i don't _want_ it to add /dev/sdd, i want it to add >> /dev/disk/by-id/usb-WD_blah_blah :) >> >> question is: how? or, does it not matter: does mdadm use UUIDs internally? > > Yes, it uses UUIDs. The problem you describe should not happen. ok, so the question therefore morphs into a long-winded self-answering one: what is it about mdadm that causes people not to be aware that UUIDs are used internally, such that they invest quite a bit of time to e.g. modify their udev rules in /etc/ (rather than add alternatives to /usr/local) and thus make their lives more awkward for future upgrades, and search for "solutions" such as endeavouring to use --add /dev/disk/by-id/XXX? the answer is that mdadm tracks down the hardlink and displays, as best i can tell, only that, with no immediately obvious options to get it to display the disk UUIDs. sooo.... here's some further questions: * is there an option to mdadm to make it display UUIDs instead of or as well as the disk name? * if not, would adding one be a good idea? * also, how about making mention of how mdadm works, in the man page somewhere reaaasonably prominently? the basic gist is that mdadm is a fantastic tool, does a far better job than people believe or understand it to be doing, protects them from themselves and any lack of knowledge of its inner workings, but that means that unfortunately it's under-promoted and in danger of being ignored (or worse, NIH-rewritten!) i would hate to see a "better" tool being written which has, at the very top of its home page, and in all freshmeat and sourceforget prominent short descriptions, "yeah! we're l33t! our software RAID tool uses UUIDs, which makes it better than mdadm. we r0ck!" :) l. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/BANLkTikbVC9ZsXT4SF-Lb3=gk2nqlmx...@mail.gmail.com
