Mounting disks by UUID rather than /dev/device

Most everyone who has to knows how to mount a disk in Linux. It's easy, mount /dev/whatever /mnt/whatever. Easy.

What becomes hard for me is when I've got a bunch of external drives hooked up to a machine, and it reboots, how do you make sure everything gets to where it belongs? I used a hack. Every disk has a .disk file that holds the directory name under /mnt/hd where the drive will be mounted. Upon boot up, the server mounts each of the USB disks it finds into a staging directory, checks the contents of the file if it exists, and then remounts it to the intended location. Like I said, a hack.

That is because when I was creating that horrible scheme, I didn't know about Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs). Each disk has one, and you can find it by looking at the UUID that lives in /dev/disk/by-uuid/. Each disk has a file in that directory which is a symbolic link back to the /dev device.

It wouldn't be too hard to write a script that looped through that directory, checked if a disk was mounted, and if not, mounted the disk according to either fstab or some other database of known disks.

Anyone using these methods? They strike me as much much more flexible than mounting by device name.