UUIDs missing in Ubuntu?

[Sean Crago]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 8:15 PM, Sean Crago <cragos at gmail.com> wrote:
> I recently did a benign looking apt-get dist-upgrade in Ubuntu
> Intrepid Ibex and, a few days later, rebooted. I think a kernel patch
> was involved, but I'm not sure/haven't tried to revert to an old one
> yet to fix this problem, but I'd like to find a cleaner fix:
>
> I have one old PATA HDD on my box that I mount on boot to /tmp via a
> UUID-based fstab entry. This used to work just fine. It's mounted a
> generic SCSI device, so it doesn't show up as hda1 anymore, but it
> shows up as sda1 and is symlinked to in /dev/disk/*/, as are my other
> generic SCSI devices - My removable media, my memory card reader, etc.
> Now, though, I don't see anything except my one SATA drive in my
> /dev/disk/by-*/ entries.
>
> To make things substantially MORE strange, all of these problems went
> away at 13:37 this afternoon, when the missing symlinks were created
> en masse. No reference at all exists to that time in any plaintext
> file in /var/log/
>
> Any guesses as to what's wrong with my system and how to prevent this
> from blocking a proper UUID-based fstab from working at boot time?
>
> Thanks,
> Sean Crago
> Kathmandu
>

Perhaps I should rephrase the question - What creates the UUID
symlinks? If I could reliably force it to go off before I mount my
fstab contents, it would fix my problem.