[comp.os.vms] cluster mounting

SYSRUTH@UTORPHYS.BITNET (06/16/87)

One means for the cluster maintaining the integrity of disks is to make
sure that there is only one copy of any given volume mounted (i.e. the
physical and volume names are both the same wherever a device is mounted).
You will also notice that if you try to mount a disk write-locked when it
is already mounted writable elsewhere in the cluster, the software will not
allow you to do it. If you tell it to mount a disk /override=id, you are
telling it to ignore the volume label. But this is its primary means of
ensuring that all disks are unique, and there is a pretty good chance that,
if it allowed someone to mount the disk without checking the volume label,
the communications about disk accesses would not work properly and the disk
could become corrupted (and then DEC would have people screaming at them).
I know that you only want to find out what the label is, but other people
might not be so careful. Can you not look where the disk is mounted on
another machine and see what the volume label is? If the physical device
name is the same on both machines, then the volume in it should also be the
same. If it isn't, you have problems.

If I've misunderstood what you were trying to do, then maybe this answer
is not applicable. But the point is that volume labels are crucial to
cluster mounting, which is why it won't let you ignore them or mount them
in a different way from other cluster machines.

Ruth Milner
Systems Manager
University of Toronto Physics
SYSRUTH@UTORPHYS.BITNET