[sclug] UUIDs

[Neil Haughton]

>
> John Stumbles further wrote:
>> Do memory cards (or memory card readers) have UUIDs too?
>
> Strictly speaking, I think not as it's filesystems, not devices,
> which have UUIDs.  sdb1 in the above list is a FAT filesystem on
> a Kingston memory stick.  It looks like the DOS disk-id or whatever
> it's called is being used as the UUID.
>
> Ed.
>

IIRC it _is_ filesystems - from what I have learned on the topic the
point (or at least, a point) of using UUIDs is that if you move the
filesystem to another partition, or even to another device, the mount
operation will still work - eg if you physically move /home from /sda1
to /sda2, as long as it has retained the UUID it will still mount on
next startup, because the startup mounting doesn't care about the
underlying device. If you weren't using UUIDs your /etc/fstab would need
to be edited before the startup mounting would work

Regards,

Neil Haughton