Bug#586182: multipath-tools: sometimes fails to create /dev/mapper/mpathN devices

[Guido Günther]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 02:57:17PM +0530, Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote:
> The maintainer for multipath-tools should be able to give you more information 
> but in my experience, the friendly_names feature of multipath-tools have 
> turned out to be more of a problem.
> 
> I believe there is a bug that talks about a locking issue with friendly_names 
> upstream.
> 
> In face, I have been recommending against friendly_names (of of the bindings 
> file). The plain LUN serial number based access is pretty good and reliable and 
> persistent.
Indeed. The mpath names by itself are merely used in d-i to be able to
detect multipath-devices easily. In every other case don't use - either
define your names in multipath.conf (but don't use mpath*) or use
/dev/disk/by-id/ (which allows easy switching from and to mp
configurations). That said I'm not sure this is the problem here. 
 -- Guido