From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Greg KH Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:23:17 +0000 Subject: Re: Device naming. Message-Id: <20100311182317.GC1713@kroah.com> List-Id: References: <4B990E29.5080206@speakeasy.net> In-Reply-To: <4B990E29.5080206@speakeasy.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-hotplug@vger.kernel.org On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 10:37:13AM -0500, Alan Grimes wrote: > I did an experiment the other day which involved plugging a USB thumb > drive into the server. To my horror, the operating system assigned it > /dev/sda. The Penguins had gone and *intentionally* designed a namespace > collision between all possible storage solutions that might be attached > to the computer!!! You must have never done this in the past. USB flash disks have been named /dev/sda since the 2.2 kernel days (back in 1999). They have never changed naming schemes here, because USB storage devices are really scsi devices at the protocol level. As others have pointed out, use /dev/disk/by-label/ and all will be fine. That is what it was created for, and is what the distros use it for. If you are using a distro that does not allow you to easily manage these disk names in a way you find acceptable, then I suggest you change your distro as there are many that handle this quite well. good luck, greg k-h