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Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 21:22:24 +0000
From: Mike Bristow <mike@urgle.com>
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To: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@msu.edu>
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Cc: Christian Baer <christian.baer@uni-dortmund.de>,
	freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Strange HDD order
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Jerry McAllister wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 12:22:30PM +0100, Christian Baer wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, 3 Feb 2008 09:40:53 -0600 Matt wrote:
>>
>>> Is the concern with the apparent out-of-order numbering based on how
>>> you want to access these devices in areas like fstab? 
>> No, not really. Once I set them up in the directory tree, what the drive's
>> device name is won't make a diff to how the system works. I was more
>> worried that maybe the device names (numbers) could change in the future
>> and then I'd have to start wonderung about what drive is what now and
>> where to mount what device now.
> 
> They won't change unless you move them.  If you rearrange the order
> then their device numbers will change and you would have to modify
> the /etc/fstab file.    But, they won't change just by rebooting
> or something like that.   You would have to open the cabinet and 
> move them.

If you are worried by this sort of thing, label your filesystems (with 
newfs -L or tunefs -L) and mount using /dev/ufs/<volname>.  My fstab has:


/dev/ufs/root		/		ufs	rw	1	1
/dev/ufs/home		/home		ufs	rw	2	2
/dev/ufs/tmp		/tmp		ufs	rw	2	2
/dev/ufs/var		/var		ufs	rw	2	2

for example.