Re: Raid 0 to 5

[Stephen J. Turnbull <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> A == A V Le Blanc <LeBlanc [at] mcc.ac.uk> writes:

A> On Fri, Sep 03, 1999 at 11:59:00PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull
A> wrote:

>> I don't know anybody whose first system had a RAID, though.

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

Well, no, not _need_. The possibilities are endless. They require
judicious choice of distribution, maybe, and a little extra effort.
You obviously could find a dozen ways to do it, mucking with root
floppies or initrds as you do for your nasty machine.

I don't blame you for not wanting to jump through those hoops. You
will build a custom kernel immediately anyway. My point is that the
great majority of users will _not_ need it (or any of the other
features I mentioned and a host of others) and they will _not_ build a
custom kernel and (like Richard) they'll be mystified by kernel
messages or (like me) unable to telnet to their machine when they hose
their ipchains setup.

A loaded distribution kernel is a convenience for you, and an
attractive nuisance for many newbies.

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

Well, both of the distributions I'm familiar with (Debian and
TurboLinux) distribute kernels loaded that way. I find it easy to
believe that Caldera and Red Hat and SuSE and Slackware do, too.

--
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Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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