>On Mon, 13 Sep 1999 00:55:17 +0200 
> Lennart Augustsson <lennart@augustsson.net> wrote:
>
> > Absolutely, but there are a number of non-removable USB disk available.
> > As for removable ones I'm sure you could come up with some "fingerprint"
> > from the superblock.
>
>sure, if you assume FFS.

Only if you use a single fingerprint style.  For example, you'd want one
for ISO9660 filesystems that uses the serial number, another that uses
the scheme microsoft uses on NT to mark their media, etc.  Of course there
may be cases where you can't get fingerprinting information, but you probably
could handle 95-99% of your installed base this way.

>Really, this is what the disklabel's packname field is for.

Yes, but I've always felt that there wasn't enough uniqueness there.
Something along the lines of a label timestamp, machine name where
the media was intantiated, and the pack name would work well.  This
way, when a conflict occurs, the user has some additional information
available to resolve the conflict.

--
Justin