[nmglug] Using Media Bay Devices In Dell 600m With Fedora Core 3

[Karl Hegbloom]

On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 14:26 -0600, Sam Noble wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 13:46 -0600, William D. Nystrom wrote:
> > > Sounds like the problem is that you've got two drives both using
> > e2label
> > > and your fstab and probably your grub config are trying to use those
> > > labels rather than actual device names.
> > 
> > Thanks for the info.  It seems to me that /etc/fstab is actually
> > getting
> > written when I reboot with a different configuration.
> 
> The fancy project utopia stuff (udev, hald, pmount, gnomeVFS
> etc.[Karlheg seems to know this stuff real well and probably knows which
> actual 'thingy' is coming in to play here.]) is probably only making
> changes for the removable devices so I'd go ahead and make the changes
> by hand for all the /dev/hda devices. 

udev : Mounts a tmpfs on /dev and populates it with device files.  They
are created as needed, by a kernel call-out (via hotplug).  There are
device nodes in there only for devices that are actually installed on
the system.

hald : http://freedesktop.org/Software/hal

pmount : Allows an ordinary user to mount a removable device without
requiring a listing for it in /etc/fstab.  It does not alter the fstab
file at all.

gnomeVFS : akin to XEmacs 'efs', or KDE 'ioslaves'.  It's a virtual file
system layer that allows access to file:, smb:, ftp:, http:, and dav:
URI's from Gnome applications that utilize it.  (I wonder if a Linux
FUSE module could be created that uses gnomeVFS?)

For what you are doing, you need to change fstab yourself.  The Utopia
system is not loaded that early anyhow.  It does not edit fstab.

> I'm not a fan of using Label=x in config files. I think the flexibility
> it provides is easily overshadowed by the likelihood of it causing
> problems. For instance I don't know a way to get a kernel to boot on a
> system with that syntax in fstab without using an initrd. 

I'm reasonably certain that handling of LABEL and UUID mounts is done by
the 'mount' program itself, and not the kernel.  There are some bugs in
it, last time I tried to use it, for managing multiple USB storage
drives, prior to the advent of 'pmount'.  With pmount, everything just
works.

-- 
Karl Hegbloom <karlheg at laclinux.com>
Los Alamos Computers, Technical Support