Rebuild ofRedHat defaulted to /dev/mapper/vg# ?

[Ratzie]

Why the /dev/mapper reference?
We were running the lastest RH ES 3 and upgraded to RedHat 4 and now when we built the volume groups it shows as /dev/mapper/yada
instead of the /dev/vg# like before.

Can this be changed back?

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom,

I don't think you can change it back.

To try would be a little dicey and might lead to a loss of data.

I like the old way, because its like HP-UX.

SEP

[Matti_Kurkela]

The new LVM system should automatically create backward-compatibility symlinks so that the old /dev/vg* paths work just as before.

It is just that tools like mount and install/update utilities prefer the "real" /dev/mapper/* paths over the symlinked /dev/vg* ones.

If you feel strongly about it, it should not be too difficult to modify the "vgscan --mknodes" command to create the traditional-style names as the real device nodes and the new ones as symlinks. This command gets executed at every boot (usually from initrd), so if you re-order the device nodes manually, the changes will not stick.

You might have to check out the udev configuration rules too: changing them might actually solve the problem just as well.