Questions re: disklabel for external USB drives

[Jerry McAllister]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 02:05:27PM -0500, up at 3.am wrote:

> 
> I just got an external USB drive that I want to use for disk-based
> backups.  It is important that this drive be useable on different FreeBSD
> servers that we have.
> 
> I got it working on a test server ok, but I noticed that the sysinstall
> utility labeled the device as:
> 
> /dev/da0s1d
> 
> Since the test server only has an IDE drive, that's fine, but this
> external USB drive needs to be able to work on productions servers that
> already have SCSI and SAS devices, one of which already uses that label
> for its active "/usr" partition.
> 
> Is there an easy way to force the device to work as something like:
> 
> /dev/da1s1d
> 
> on all of the servers, including ones that do not already have a SCSI disk
> subsystem and existing /dev/da0 devices?

You don't have to do that unless you are worried about getting confused.
If you put the drive on a machine that already has da0 used up, it will
magically become da1.   The label doesn't have anything to do with
whether it is da0 or da1.   That is determined by its position on the
controller.

I think, in FreeBSD SCSI device stuff, you can force it to be
something, but I have never done it and don't know how - and since
it doesn't matter, don't see the reason to try.

////jerry

> 
> TIA,
> 
> James Smallacombe		      PlantageNet, Inc. CEO and Janitor
> up at 3.am							    http://3.am
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> 
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