In traditional Linux, disk devices are recognized by the kernel at the boot process and accessed via a “virtual” block device file residing in the /dev directory. These were created as static devices during installation. For example:
/dev/sda – first SCSI hard drive or CDROM
/dev/hda – first IDE hard drive or CDROM
/dev/sdb – second SCSI hard drive or CDROM
and so forth.
It could become a problem when you move the disks around the BUS or just simply transfer the OS to a new hardware because there’s no guarantee that the hardware layout, driver, etc. will be the same and these static device names may refer to non existing hardware causing system boot failure.
udev for the rescue
To avoid such issues, kernel developers created udev software to manage these device descriptions dynamically.
Therefore in most Linux distributions including SLES the /dev directory is actually tmpfs, a temporary file system which gets created by udev every time the system boots.
Apart from the traditional device names udev creates persistent device names as well. These could be unique UUID numbers or strings generated from the combination of hard drive vendor’s name and serial numbers, etc. It makes “permanent” your device’s description on the kernel’s level.
The point is that if we refer to our devices by these persistent device names in our configurations there’s a very small chance that we run into problems if we change the hardware layout hence it has become the default for most Linux distributions nowadays including SLES10.
Create, convert to persistent device names
I have been upgrading my SLES10 installations since GA release, at that time the installer didn’t use persistent names in default so I had to convert my existing configurations.
I had the following disk arrangement:
sles10:~ # fdisk -l /dev/cciss/c0d0 Disk /dev/cciss/c0d0: 73.3 GB, 73372631040 bytes 255 heads, 32 sectors/track, 17562 cylinders Units = cylinders of 8160 * 512 = 4177920 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/cciss/c0d0p1 1 17562 71652928+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/cciss/c0d0p5 1 258 1052194+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/cciss/c0d0p6 258 1288 4200966 83 Linux /dev/cciss/c0d0p7 1288 2513 4997984 83 Linux /dev/cciss/c0d0p8 2513 2758 999584 83 Linux /dev/cciss/c0d0p9 2758 17562 60402089 83 Linux
To find out your persistent device name for a certain partition:
sles10:~ # udevinfo -q symlink -n /dev/cciss/c0d0p1 disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001035303620202020200003-part1 disk/by-path/pci-0000:06:00.0-cciss-0:40000000-part1
For this particular device there’s no UUID (usually there is) and I prefer always the disk “by-id” names. WARNING: the UUID changes when you format the file system hence not very ideal.
Now find out all of your new IDs for all of your partitions then replace the corresponding fstab entries. Keep the /dev/ bits and add the rest as udev returns, mine looks like this:
sles10:~ # vi /etc/fstab /dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001035303620202020200003-part6 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1 /dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001035303620202020200003-part8 /tmp ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 2 /dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001035303620202020200003-part7 /var ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 2 /dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001035303620202020200003-part5 swap swap defaults 0 0 -snip-
You must replace all entries in your grub configuration as well:
sles10:~ # vi /boot/grub/menu.lst -snip module /boot/vmlinuz-220.127.116.11-0.33-xenpae root=/dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001035303620202020200003-part6 vga=0x317 resume=/dev/cciss/c0d0p5 splash=silent showopts -snip kernel /boot/vmlinuz-18.104.22.168-0.33-bigsmp root=/dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001035303620202020200003-part6 vga=0x317 resume=/dev/cciss/c0d0p5 splash=silent showopts -snip kernel /boot/vmlinuz-22.214.171.124-0.33-bigsmp root=/dev/disk/by-id/cciss-3600508b1001035303620202020200003-part6 vga=normal showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off noresume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 edd=off 3 -snip
Make sure that every entry is typo free!!! If you made a mistake your system may fail to boot!