Heya. I'm currently messing about with a server one of my friends has (running Debian Etch network install)

First time I booted the machine I had the following drive layout
/dev/sda (3 system partitions)
/dev/sdb (160gb - 1 partition)
/dev/sdc (500gb - 1 partition)
/dev/sdf (250gb - 2 partitions)
/dev/sdd (250gb - 1 partition)
/dev/sde (203gb - 1 partition)

Now a few reboots later, I noticed that sdf and sde had switched places -- this is very unfortunate since /etc/fstab are mounting the disks to directories which are then shared on a Samba server.

Needless to say, the paths would change if devices switch names and things would generally be a bloody mess

INFO: sda and sdb are internal SATA-disks the rest are USB-connected disks

Now I'm thinking about creating a script which filters through dmesg-output and mounts the discs where they ought to be and subsequently booting the samba server (so that the paths will work when the server is booted).

However, I'm asking you guys, is there a more elegant/easy way or has this been done by someone else before ?

Sounds like you need to be looking at setting up specific udev rules. I don't know Debian, but may try starting at /etc/udev/rules.d

You may be able to mount them using labels. e2label can assign a label to a partition, then in /etc/fstab use LABEL=yourlabel instead of /dev/sde1, and so on.

Thx you guys I didn't know you could set labels to help resolve such things! (hey, learned something new, so thats great!)

e2label can only be used on ext2/ext3 partitions though. However I found that reiserfs has an equivalent option in reisertunefs:

reistertunefs --label <labelname> <device>
ex: reisertunefs --label homedirs /dev/sda2 ((whatever the place the disk is at that boot)

to mount this in fstab:
LABEL=homedirs /home reiserfs auto,notail,noatime 0 0

The cool thing about this is that you don't have to worry about which device node the drive got. With this you can switch your disks cables around or use several USB-drives as we do without worrying about the exact node.. Nice huh ?

FYI: I found that this is doable both when creating partitions and with existing partitions, it's also possible to do on XFS-filesystems!

Personally I don't like labels. Try putting a labelled disk into a system that already has a disk with that same label (people tend to use the same name(s) across multiple systems).

Whatever works for you though is good ...

That's a good point, I had that problem installing an old disk with /root for the label and then couldn't boot normally.

The same sort of problem happens with LVM.

What's a better way to get around this, I'd also like to know.
Usually I try to fix these problems by booting first with a live-cd and erasing the new disk's label, then rebooting normally works again.