When the system is booted, SCSI devices are assigned device filenames in a more or less dynamic way. This is no problem as long as the number or configuration of the devices does not change. However, if a new SCSI hard disk is added and the new hard disk is detected by the kernel before the old hard disk, the old disk is assigned a new name and the entry in the mount table /etc/fstab no longer matches.

To avoid this problem, the system start-up script boot.scsidev could be used. Enable this script using /sbin/insserv and set parameters for it in /etc/sysconfig/scsidev. The script /etc/rc.d/boot.scsidev handles the setup of the SCSI devices during the boot procedure and enters permanent device names under /dev/scsi/. These names can then be used in /etc/fstab. In addition, /etc/scsi.alias can be used to define persistent names for the SCSI configuration. The naming scheme of the devices in /etc/scsi is explained in man scsidev.

In the expert mode of the runlevel editor, activate boot.scsidev for level B. The links needed for generating the names during the boot procedure are then created in /etc/init.d/boot.d.

	Device Names and udev
For SUSE LINUX, although boot.scsidev is still supported, the preferred way to create persistent device names is to use udev to create device nodes with persistent names in /dev/by-id/.