Mount by label
Technical ·Saturday February 12, 2011 @ 15:52 EST (link)
I'm sure this is an old features by now—seems to have been around since 2007 or even earlier—but I finally got around to investigating how to mount my array of /dev/sdXn devices without having to depend on the order they're detected, using, of course, the disk label (set by the appropriate tool for the filesystem, such as e2label or mlabel). Setting LABEL="…" in /etc/fstab works great for VFAT and ext3 drives (which is all I've tried it on) and is much better than having to worry about the particular ordering of labels that the system will produce, even for drives that are fairly permanent (couple of LaCie FireWire 800s, for instance) and especially for devices like cameras.
