Identifying disks, drives and network mounts

[Madison Kelly]

Hi all,

   I have been struggling with this problem for a couple of years now 
(yes, really!) and have tried a couple different solutions that were 
never as robust as I would like. So I am hoping some brainiac here might 
have an idea! :)

   I need a way to look at a partition, be it a local, 
USB/Firewire-connected, SCSI, network or other disk and say "you are 
this particular device".

- I can't rely on block paths because only IDE/SATA disks are (somewhat) 
static.

- I can't rely on the drive's serial number because disks connected via 
USB/Firewire(?) return the USB-IDE/SATA's ASIC serial number and that 
could cause problems with carriers with swappable carriers.

- I can't rely on 'file -s /dev/xx/' because it only returns serial 
numbers for locally connected drives with MS formatting.

- I can't rely on 'blkid' because it doesn't seem to be on non-Linux 
(ie: BSD, Solaris) systems.

   I have a couple ideas, but they have problems (maybe someone could 
help me with).

- If I could reliably get a unique ID (serial number, UUID, etc) for a 
given partition I'd be happy. 'blkid' does this somehow, so I know it's 
possible.

- I could "sign" partitions using a small text file and generate my own 
serial numbers. The problem here is trusting that I would have 
permissions to do so. This is a backup program so I suspect people would 
likely mount remote network shares read-only, which would prevent me 
from writing this file.


   Any ideas (or corrections to my assumptions) would be greatly 
appreciated! I realize I may need to settle on a combination of 
solutions, but I'd like to keep that to a minimum, too.

Thanks muchly!!

Madi
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