“Slug,” my Linux-hacked Linksys NSLU2 has been running Openslug Linux for months now and generally doing great. When the battery began dying on the UPS its been plugged into, Slug would reboot when the power would drop. It would then boot up but would frequently swap the drive order when it did, causing all sorts of mayhem.
After fiddling more with Slug and learning lots about embedded Linux, I found a helpful wiki article about how to teach Openslug the order in which to mount drives. Openslug 3.1 (the latest) was supposed to have solved this problem once and for all, but it apparently has a bug in the initrd that ignores the kernel command line’s specification of the root partition. In other words, it still mounts drives in an unpredictable order.
Slug is fine as long as it doesn’t reboot, as I can connect USB drives after bootup and control the mounting order that way. Eventually, though, I’ll have to dig into the initrd and fix the bug, which I admit would be fun once I can find a little time to do it. I either do that or get a new UPS battery!