From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Eddie Williams Subject: Re: [RFC] Persistent naming of scsi devices Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 10:04:01 -0400 Sender: linux-scsi-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <200204101405.KAA09838@hancock.sc.steeleye.com> References: <20020410091918.C546@thunk.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Return-path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hancock.sc.steeleye.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id KAA10212 for ; Wed, 10 Apr 2002 10:05:58 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20020410091918.C546@thunk.org> List-Id: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org To: Theodore Tso , "Martin K. Petersen" Cc: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org On Wednesday 10 April 2002 09:19 am, Theodore Tso wrote: > That is indeed a hard problem, and ultimately, the thing that will > make this easier is if there's some way we can read out a > drive-specific serial number out of the ATAPI or SCSI interfaces. I > don't know if disk serial numbers are commonly supported by disk > manufacturers, but hopefully the newer disks have something like that > we can use. Without it, though, the problem is very, very hard if you > want to make it 100% foolproof --- and hence, something which > civilians (i.e., stupid users) can use. While I enjoy bashing stupid users I would like to point out that persistent naming, while it makes life easier for stupid users, it has tremendous benefits for all of us. We (the product I work on) have used serial numbers for a long time to uniquely identify devices and this improves the ease of use tremendously. In a cluster this is really critical or one can easily try to bring an application in-service on a wrong device with catestrophic results. Eddie