can't set ext2 volume label with tune2fs

[Miroslav Lachman]

Hi,

I have an external disk WD320 connected by USB to machine running 
FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE i386 GENERIC. I need to use this disk for rsync 
backups. I tried to set label on existing filesystem, but label is still 
empty:

Order of commands:

root at kapo ~/# tune2fs -l /dev/da0s1
tune2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Filesystem volume name:   <none>
Last mounted on:          <not available>
Filesystem UUID:          e17f87a5-8448-4518-b899-4e2ce2918354
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53
.
.

root at kapo ~/# tune2fs -L usbWD320m5Sbkp1 /dev/da0s1
tune2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)

root at kapo ~/# tune2fs -l /dev/da0s1
tune2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Filesystem volume name:   <none>
Last mounted on:          <not available>
Filesystem UUID:          e17f87a5-8448-4518-b899-4e2ce2918354
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53
Filesystem revision #:    1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features:      has_journal filetype sparse_super
Default mount options:    (none)
Filesystem state:         clean
Errors behavior:          Continue
Filesystem OS type:       Linux
Inode count:              39075840
Block count:              78142160
Reserved block count:     3907108
Free blocks:              11412001
Free inodes:              38767335
First block:              0
Block size:               4096
Fragment size:            4096
Blocks per group:         32768
Fragments per group:      32768
Inodes per group:         16384
Inode blocks per group:   512
Filesystem created:       Tue May 23 15:24:24 2006
Last mount time:          Sun Apr 29 23:09:04 2007
Last write time:          Thu Oct  7 11:30:43 2010
Mount count:              21
Maximum mount count:      34
Last checked:             Tue May 23 15:24:24 2006
Check interval:           15552000 (6 months)
Next check after:         Sun Nov 19 14:24:24 2006
Reserved blocks uid:      0 (user root)
Reserved blocks gid:      0 (group wheel)
First inode:              11
Inode size:               128
Journal inode:            8
Default directory hash:   tea
Directory Hash Seed:      8ff346bb-24c2-4ea4-b07f-993fd3f21f61


As you can see, this is rather old disk formated on an old Linux machine 
(4 years ago).

Is it a known bug, that label can't be set by tune2fs?

I need to mount external disks by label instead of device name as the 
mount and backup will be scripted and I can't be sure what the device 
number (da0, da1, da2...) will be if somebody connect another disk 
device to this machine.

Setting volume label with mke2fs works fine (on new disks), but I don't 
want to do it on this disk because it contains valuable data.

Next strange thing is error message when I run `ls` command on /dev/ext2fs

root at kapo ~/# ls -al /dev/ext2fs/
ls: : No such file or directory
total 1
dr-xr-xr-x   3 root  wheel  512 Oct 22 04:04 .
dr-xr-xr-x  10 root  wheel  512 Oct 22 06:04 ..

As you can see, /dev/ext2fs exists. Plain `ls /dev/ext2fs/` is OK, but 
if I add '-l', it prints error "ls: : No such file or directory"

Miroslav Lachman