On 9/10/07, De Zeurkous <zeurkous@nichten.info> wrote:
> On Mon, September 10, 2007 21:44, James Hartley wrote:
> > Should USB device initialization be more deterministic/serial?
>  ...
> The generic problem with automagic discovery is the coerced relationship
> between a device and its connection path -- even replacing a trivial (say,
> a switch) node in said path can (and often will) cause the path to change,
> and thus affect discovery order. What we need is a way to map a device
> according to it's hardware address to an interface, and have the kernel
> wait (and possibly timeout waiting) for a device to be discovered before
> giving the go-ahead for the fsck and subsequent mount(s). It's the only
> way to fix this in the long run.
>
> Unfortunately, this also means that when a device is replaced (say, a
> faulty disk with a working one), the mapping needs to be adjusted manually
> (although some magic may detect live replacement, it's not very reliable
> and won't work dead). This is not fixable without fixing the applicable
> protocols to enable the assignment of some luser-set ID. The mapping
> described above is the best we can do in that regard.

Thank you for your comments.  I have one last newbie question:  is
there a way to edit /etc/fstab while in single user mode?  From what I
can tell, / is mounted read-only...

Thanks again to all for this discourse.  It has been very educational.

Jim