On Tuesday 21 August 2007, Feizhou wrote: > Les Mikesell wrote: > > Jim Perrin wrote: > >>> Should it be possible to hot-swap SATA drives with Centos5? > >> Depends on the SATA controller, but yes. If the controller allows, you > >> can hotswap sata drives. > > How are the names supposed to work when one may be missing at bootup and > > added later? > I thought the system would just assign the next available /dev/sdx? > Then there was the post about wanting to be able to pull a SATA/eSATA > disk in and have the system automatically mount whatever filesystem is > on the disk... That was mine. Still working on it. As to the hardware support, the definitive answer is found at www.linux-ata.org As to device naming, use LABEL= to fix that. SCSI device naming on Linux stinks. I'm dinking around with a Ubuntu install right now that is giving me fits because of linux PCI/SCSI weirdness. The boot drive (as set in the BIOS) is probed by the kernel as /dev/sdc. Fun. The setup has two 80GB drives in MD RAID1 (200MB /boot on /dev/md0, and 77GB / on /dev/md1, both on the same drives) and four 250GB drives in 3-disk RAID5 with a hotspare. The drives are spread on three two port controllers (no, I don't have a four or six port controller handy, not an option in this case). Still working grub to get the thing to boot.... LABEL= does actually have its uses; I migrated a filesystem on a CentOS 4 VM running on one of our two VMware ESX beasts (2x Dell 6950, 4x dual core Opterons, 32GB RAM each, dual 4Gb/s fibre-channel to 2x EMC CLARiiON CX3-10c's with 20TB each) from the internal 3x300GB RAID to a 1.95TB LUN on the CX3. By using LABEL=, I was able to blow the drive away in VI Client on the VM, and boot right up without device ordering problems. But I have also been bitten by the 'LABELs are the same on cloned disks' fun and games.... What I'm currently doing with the eSATA deal is having an entry in fstab, set to noauto, and using LABEL=, and an icon in KDE to mount it on the desktop. it is not seamless; unmounting is much more of a chore, as KDE has fun with the icon, doesn't enable the context menu 'safely remove' (aka, unmount) option, etc. But it's better than nothing. Just haven't had time to see how to enable SCSI removable support (dig through the udev and hotplug stuff sometime and you'll see what I mean) in libata as yet. With SCSI removable support (which usbstorage implements, which is why it works) the system Just Works properly. -- Lamar Owen Chief Information Officer Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu