Re: Raid 0 to 5

[Dr A V Le Blanc <nospam [at] mcc.ac.uk>]

On Fri, Sep 03, 1999 at 11:59:00PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> I don't know anybody whose first system had a RAID, though. I
> see that as a 6-sigma outlier. I find it hard to imagine the user
> profile who would be starting with a RAID system, and get stopped by
> lack of a kernel with MD ....

If you're doing an initial installation on a machine (not your first
installation, but the machine's first installation), and you want
MD for, say, /usr or anything in the standard area, you need it
in from the beginning.

> Note I don't object to fancy modules. Distributions should come with
> a nice big collection of these.

Note that RAID is not available as loadable modules.

> And why is all the firewalling and masquerading stuff getting built
> in? That stuff does not affect the ability to upgrade a system at
> all, and is the source of a lot of pain for new users. IPv6: totally
> irrelevant as yet.

I don't accept every single choice made by every distributor, of
course.

> I'm confused. I never use the kernel in the box in an upgrade, I've
> always got a newer kernel whose bugs I know. With the two exceptions
> of starting on a new machine, or beta testing a distribution.
>
> Are there really distributions that force you to _install_ the kernel
> in the box for an upgrade?[1] With the single exception of a massively
> incompatible libc upgrade (a.out -> ELF, HJ Liu -> glibc), I don't see
> the need. Even there, for the libc5 -> libc6 transition there was a
> script to do it on a running system under Debian.

There were, but I don't use them. On the other hand, if you look
after as many Linux boxes as I do (about 100 this past year), you
don't have a custom fixup floppy for each one; you use a 'standard
backup/recovery' disk from your favourite distribution, and it's
nice that it can deal with the machines with MD stuff.

I do have one nasty machine, which requires a custom recovery set
with a very large SCSI driver. I can't get it all onto a traditional
floppy, and I needed to do some tweaking to get a system to boot
with a ramdisk image for / on a different floppy from the boot
floppy.

-- Owen
LeBlanc@mcc.ac.uk

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