One of the problems I’ve had with all the removable devices that I use (iPod, SD cards, and external hard drive) is that while Mandrake 10.1 (Mandriva) is generally pretty good about hotplugging them, if I have more than one plugged in, their device name (and Mandriva’s auto-generated mount point) differs depending on the order they are plugged in. Previously, I solved that by always plugging the devices in in a certain order, but that’s less than ideal and quite annoying. Today I ran across this how-to for a USB memory key under RH9 that introduced me to devlabel, which will (hopefully!) allow me to assign permanent device names to my removable devices. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any Mandrake RPM’s available nor any previous user who’s set it up. I’m downloading the tarball to see if I can compile it (fingers crossed!). Interestingly, it seems to be developed by Dell (and more friendly promo page).
ADD THE DISK TO DEVLABEL
devlabel attempts to give the same device name to removable media,
wherever they appear on the bus. We want our memory disk to always
appear as /dev/usbdisk1 no matter what USB bus it is on or what other
USB disk might be present.# devlabel printid -d /dev/sda1
S80:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
# devlabel add -s /dev/usbdisk1 –partnum 1 -u ‘S80:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX’
Created symlink /dev/usbdisk1 -> /dev/sda1
Added /dev/usbdisk1 to /etc/sysconfig/devlabel
Tags: linux