USB Disks with no Serials

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@bmcgonag Welcome to the Rockstor community.

@bmcgonag

Hello, also sorry to resurrect an older thread …

No worries on that account. The more interested input the better.

Re:

@bmcgonag

I do, however, see that the drives are assigned a number 0:0, 0:1, 0:2, 0:3 when they are attached, but have no idea if this is fixed, or can change on reboot.

To this question, it looks like we have already had the answer from @outicnz Re:

@outicnz

To answer your question on whether the “0:0” or “0:1” is assigned by the bay of the drive. Sadly not. The last digit sequentially increases for each drive detected regardless of the bay that it is located in.

And from this it pretty much guarantees, on startup, this element of the drive name is arbitrarily assigned. As such it is unreliable and so can’t be used by Rockstor as a reliable drive ‘tracker’.

It may be that there are setting on these enclosures, or firmware fixes etc, that can lead to a reliable naming mechanism. We absolutely need a reliable way to identify (read track) an individual drive regardless of it’s content in order to do the thing we try to do. If you can find a way to retrieve the serial number of a drive whilst it’s within one of these enclosures then it should be possible to first recognise when a drive is within one of these and second to singularly identify that drive by a special case instigated by the enclosure indicator.

So as per my comment to @outicnz

@phillxnet

Do please keep us updated on an other future firmware or internal/external switch option that might change this behaviour as then we could look to accommodating their behaviour if it turned out it was then possible.

Sorry for the bad news.

I’d suggest, since you have local access to one of these enclosures, that there is an opportunity to confirm @outicnz findings re:

@phillxnet

Sort of it: if each bay consistently get the same 0:1 type ending irrespective of it’s content or any of the other bays content then we have a usable ‘bay stable’ system. Otherwise we do not.

and

@phillxnet

I.e if a drive is not moved from one bay to the next it will always have the given say “000000000000-0:1” unique element (think those 2 same model drives where there is nothing more to tell them apart). So although less robust it is a potential, if slightly degraded’ way, of tracking a device.

to which @outicnz’s understanding is that these names do not represent slots. In which case the next immidiate hope might be to modify/install udev rules that do give us drive or at least bay tracking capability. But even if we got bay tracking stability, if one move a drive from one bay to another it’s serial number would change. That, to Rockstor, would mean the original appearance of the drive (in it’s first bay) would disappear and a new drive would appear. This does not lend itself to stable device tracking. Let us know how you get on. Also it may well be worth confirming this behaviour re changing serial numbers as per drive time start-up in our Rockstor 4 release which has a far newer kernel. Things may have changed in the mean time in how the linux kernel and udev treat/see these devices:

See:

Rockstor 4 Installer Recipe - call for beta testers

I am somewhat relieved, and a little surprised, to finally be announcing our new installer recipe. And I would like to call on those interested to ‘check our workings’. We do not yet have a binary download of the resulting installer as we must first ensure we are finalised on what it is we intend to be distributing in binary form in the first place. This new repository release, and this forum threads/request, is all part of that process. So please visit the above repo and try out the instruct…

and it’s linked and associated GitHub repo:

GitHub - rockstor/rockstor-installer: The kiwi-ng configuration used to create Rockstor...

Hope that helps.