Assignment of device names to external USB drives

[Kevin Downey]

On 5/19/07, Denis Fortin <fortin at acm.org> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I am trying to set up a backup server, using a combination of internal
> and external (USB) disk drives.
>
> How can I manage the mapping of USB disk drives to device names?  i.e.
> USB drives get assigned device names like da0, da1, da2... when they are
> detected.  But if one of the drives fails or is not powered up, all
> other ones will get bumped down one in the list next time I reboot.
>
> The problem is that if I automatically "mount /dev/da0a
> /archive/volume1", "mount /dev/da1a /archive/volume2", etc. I run the
> risk of having the wrong disk being mounted on a mount point !?!
>
> Is there an obvious solution that I'm missing, or a canonical workaround
> to this problem?
>
> Thanks
>
> Denis F.

when you newfs a drive use the -L flag to give it a label like
'VOLUME1' then if you load the geom_label module that drive becomes
availble under /dev/ufs/VOLUME1

-- 
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has
occurred." G. B. Shaw
www.thelastcitadel.com