Universally Unique IDentifier(s)
Posted: 29 Jul 2019, 17:19
Since I know you love to read my rants, typically about Linux but not always, I'll just add this to the list for your reading enjoyment.
It's not a big problem, but the Ubuntu installed on my laptop takes several minutes to boot up. It's been that way for a several days but I've been busy with other Linux projects and had no time to look into this issue. This morning I looked.
The first place I looked was on Google. To my amazement an article by Dedoimedo came up near the top. I recognize this name from the days Glenn was around to help me through my Linux adventures. He loved this guy. While there are many possible reasons for a slow boot Dedoimedo showed me a couple new commands wherein I can list the time it took to boot various processes (systemd-analyze critical-chain works like magic). Then there is also the boot log. Between the two I discovered that the system was hanging while looking for SWAP. I thought this to be odd but sure enough. When I opened Gparted to check things out, SWAP was not enabled. I could have enabled it, but don't really need it at this point., I need it to be identifiable during the boot process.
The Dedo man went through an example where his SWAP was hanging up the boot process due to a mismatch of UUID's for that partition. He claims to have fixed the slow boot by changing the UUID in /etc/fstab. Sounded reasonable to me. So I looked at the information block for the SWAP space listed with Gparted and got the UUID. It was not the same as the UUID specified in fstab so that I figured this was going to be a quick cure. But Dedoimedo didn't use Gparted to get his UUID. He used the blkid command instead. Well I got a list of devices and their UUID but the one for SWAP was not the same as the other two. The really confusing part is that all three UUID listings came from the correct partition: /dev/sda5. Gparted looked at it, fstab looked at it, and blkid looked at it; they all came up with different "unique" identifiers.
I'm scratching my head to try and understand how this could happen. The only possible explanation is that things got messed up while I was trying to install Linux MINT on that infamous USB memory stick. This doesn't make sense given that the hard disk with SWAP only was used to access the efi partition where all the GRUBs are installed, but who knows for sure? So, the question I have at the moment is how do I know which UUID is the right one? The one in fstab is obviously wrong, and the other two methods supposedly access the partition directly to get their info. It's just that different info is coming back. And once I get the correct UUID, is editing fstab really so simple? Change the UUID and I'm done??
I"m REALLY getting suspicious of that Ubuntu installer program.
It's not a big problem, but the Ubuntu installed on my laptop takes several minutes to boot up. It's been that way for a several days but I've been busy with other Linux projects and had no time to look into this issue. This morning I looked.
The first place I looked was on Google. To my amazement an article by Dedoimedo came up near the top. I recognize this name from the days Glenn was around to help me through my Linux adventures. He loved this guy. While there are many possible reasons for a slow boot Dedoimedo showed me a couple new commands wherein I can list the time it took to boot various processes (systemd-analyze critical-chain works like magic). Then there is also the boot log. Between the two I discovered that the system was hanging while looking for SWAP. I thought this to be odd but sure enough. When I opened Gparted to check things out, SWAP was not enabled. I could have enabled it, but don't really need it at this point., I need it to be identifiable during the boot process.
The Dedo man went through an example where his SWAP was hanging up the boot process due to a mismatch of UUID's for that partition. He claims to have fixed the slow boot by changing the UUID in /etc/fstab. Sounded reasonable to me. So I looked at the information block for the SWAP space listed with Gparted and got the UUID. It was not the same as the UUID specified in fstab so that I figured this was going to be a quick cure. But Dedoimedo didn't use Gparted to get his UUID. He used the blkid command instead. Well I got a list of devices and their UUID but the one for SWAP was not the same as the other two. The really confusing part is that all three UUID listings came from the correct partition: /dev/sda5. Gparted looked at it, fstab looked at it, and blkid looked at it; they all came up with different "unique" identifiers.
I'm scratching my head to try and understand how this could happen. The only possible explanation is that things got messed up while I was trying to install Linux MINT on that infamous USB memory stick. This doesn't make sense given that the hard disk with SWAP only was used to access the efi partition where all the GRUBs are installed, but who knows for sure? So, the question I have at the moment is how do I know which UUID is the right one? The one in fstab is obviously wrong, and the other two methods supposedly access the partition directly to get their info. It's just that different info is coming back. And once I get the correct UUID, is editing fstab really so simple? Change the UUID and I'm done??
I"m REALLY getting suspicious of that Ubuntu installer program.