It's a program for SunOS that copies a label, verbatim, from one disk to
another except, if your source disk's ASCII label is "foo" and
your destination disk's ASCII label is "bar", then dup-label will
rewrite the target disk's ASCII label to "foo, was bar". This can be
less confusing to future admins, when they discover that what Sun format
is identifying as a Maxtor, but the same disk has a Seagate label on its
exterior.
And of course, the program recomputes the label checksum, to make it,
well, work.
How safe is this program??
dup-label is loaded with consistency checking, but there is still the
small possibility that you find yourself with a messed up disk label
anyway. In that case, you should be able to restore the label with
format's "autoconfigure" option, but I cannot say with 100% certainty
that autoconfigure will always bail you out. So beware...
License
This software is owned by The university of California, Irvine,
and is not distributed under
any version of the GPL. GPL is a fine series of licenses, but the owners of the software need it to be distributed under these terms.
It might be a good thing to someday add an option to dup-label, that
would set up one partition with any extra space left over, if you were
to dup-label from a smaller disk to a larger disk.
The program should complain if you attempt to duplicate a
label to a disk that isn't large enough to handle that label!
There's an assumption being made that the user will always dup-label from
a smaller disk to a larger disk. Note that sometimes disks with
the same manufacturer and model may have different sizes - though
if you can get two disks with consecutive serial numbers, that probably
means it's relatively likely that the disks are the "same".
Someday, maybe the program will support x86 partitioning, which is quite different from Sparc partitioning. The
program makes no specific effort to ensure that you're on a sparc system rather than an x86 system, however x86
systems will most likely fail the checksum consistency precondition.
