OK, last year when I set up my Linode, I used the devices /dev/ubd/0, /dev/ubd/1, and /dev/ubd/2 in my fstab.

Then ... a few weeks ago, I rebooted my Linode for an upgrade, and suddenly the swap and home partition wouldn't mount any more. I poked around a bit, and saw that in the configuration profile I was using that the devices were listed as /dev/udba, /dev/udbb, and /dev/udbc. So, I changed my fstab accordingly, rebooted, and everything was fine.

Now, just a few minutes ago, my Linode got rebooted because of a kernel panic on the host machine, and once again it wouldn't mount the swap and home partitions. So, I went back, looked at the configuration profile, and the devices are still listed as ubda, etc. However ... poking around on the Linode, I see that the devices are /dev/udb/0 again.

Am I doing something wrong here? Going crazy?

I'm running Gentoo, if that makes any difference.

I'd guess there were some changes in the kernel that you were using. If you're set to use the latest 2.4.x or 2.6.x kernel, it's possible that changes like this can happen.

Or, if you're on host40, it could be because during the maintenance yesterday they reverted the host kernel to an older version. But that doesn't make sense if you rebooted your VDS and then it didn't work, so I'll guess it's a problem with the VDS kernel, not the host kernel.

I've *never* touched my fstab and *never* had a problem . . . coincidence? Who knows.

I had a report of this a few days ago with a guy I helped out in the IRC channel. We haven't changed anything, and I can't think of anything that would cause your devfs to load/not to load.

The Configuration Profile on the website has always read "/dev/ubd[a-h]" even though Gentoo users need to use /dev/ubd/[0-7].

-Chris

Honestly, I'd never paid attention to what the images were listed as on the configuration profile page until things weren't working the first time. I just knew that I couldn't mount the images ... mount complained that the devices didn't exist ... and then when I checked to make sure that the images were still listed, I noticed the discrepancy between what was listed their and what was listed in my fstab.

It's really interesting that it booted and succesfully mounted the images using the /dev/dba[a-h] terminology. I'm pretty sure that during that time period I rebooted at least once for a glibc update.

This happened to me. It looks like a result of going from devfsd to udev. I also moved from kernel 2.4 to 2.6. Now my console is /dev/tty0 and my drives are /dev/ubd[a-f]

I'm still in the middle of upgrading, so I guess I'll see if things magically change again. I am not going to start my build again from scratch just to test this theory though...

btw, turning off RC_DEVICE_TARBALL in /etc/conf.d/rc seems to cleanup the crud in /dev

I had the same issue with Gentoo, but did not upgrade kernels. I'm now /dev/ubd[a-f] which only affected my swap for a while. Just something to watch for I guess. If I had a more complex partitioning scheme this probably would have affected me worse.