I just stumbled over some good documentation on the usage of devlabel in Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 3 System Administrators Guide. I've gotten some emails of people looking for this specific type of thing, so hopefully this will fill that need.

Interestingly, at work on Friday, a co-worker and I discovered that when you plugged a usb key into his old desktop system with a funky cd-rom drive, devlabel's algorithm to find the device's uuid was causing the cdrom to eject the cdrom drive every 30 seconds. Our conjecture was that scanning for the devices uuid was, for some internal design reason of the cdrom, causing a bus reset which led to the eject action. Happily with the latest devlabel which implements an internal ignore list to avoid such bad devices, the problem went away. Unfortunately, the older devlabel is on the RHEL 3 gold cds.

By Gary at 01:29 PM in Linux | Comments (0)