Identifying disks with serial number

[Miroslav Lachman]

Graham Todd wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> Quick question on disk serial numbers. Besides manually geom_label-ling
> disks by serial number is there an automagic way for geom to present
> serial numbers to the system/devfs?  I'm not using ZFS or anything but
> I've got to the point where anything that helps with juggling disks would
> be nice.
> 
> I noticed a newish DragonflyBSD feature that does this. They "label" disks
> with serial numbers, devfs seems to see them and then you can use
> convenience aliases in /etc/devtab to make the serial number ID
> referenceable in /etc/fstab). See:
> 
>  http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/users/2009-08/msg00149.html
> 
> Something similar was discussed in freebsd-arch thread long ago (by the
> usual suspects (-: ):
> 
>  http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2006-June/005344.html
> 
> Is there a documented way to "autolabel" disks by serial number in FreeBSD?

It was discussed [1], but there are no labels by disk ID at this time. 
There are auto labels for partitions. You can then use ufsid in your fstab.

GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider ad4s1a is ufsid/4a985d01cb85f79f.
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider ad4s1d is ufsid/4a985d015b316798.
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider ad4s1e is ufsid/4a985d015260f27c.

1] http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-geom/2009-July/003625.html

Miroslav Lachman