Suggestion from a noob

[hansbkk]

Sorry if this has already been discussed here; I did search first.

I've got some filers with a very large number of disks and partitions,
and as you know the device numbers are pretty much random these days
with modern kernels. GRUB adds to this issue, in that I've discovered
it's hd# order is completely different from every other OS I'm using -
beside the server production ones, I use various distros for
maintenance tasks, mostly booting LiveCD from ISO copied to my
dedicated GRUB2 partitions.

Of course UUIDs are one answer to this - but not "the answer", as they
aren't very human-friendly - I personally prefer labeling my
partitions and using those. But what scheme to use for the labels? My
answer - GRUB2's order, because it's relatively stable (BIOS order,
right?) and operating-system independent. FYI I use g0102 for
(hd0,msdos2) - the g's to remind me it's grub's ordering, I used to
use sysresccd to set the standard, but have found that the v2 release
has started randomizing the sd#'s as badly as say Ubuntu does.

So here's my suggestion - please allow users to actually SET the
labels right from the grub CLI! Right now, I'm putting files into my
partitions and using grub's search -f facility to identify its
ordering, and then I have to boot up into an OS to set the labels,
then back to grub to check I got it right.

I realize the different filesystems have different label structures,
but if you were able to handle say dos/ntfs plus the top four Linux
filesystems that should cover 99% of the needs out there.

Just an idea, if it's a stupid one, please let me know why - and if
you've got a better suggestion than the above kludge for figuring out
which disk is which please fill me in! (for most of my servers all the
disks have identical partitioning)

Thanks in advance. . .

PS BTW booting from RAID arrays of course makes all this go away, but
I ran into problems with booting-from-ISO with certain distros, so I'm
sticking to regular partitions for now.