Re: RAID HOWTOs

["Brian D. Haymore" <brian@chpc.utah.edu>]

Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> 
> "Brian D. Haymore" wrote:
> >
> > Alessandro Rubini wrote:
> > >
> > > > Not quite.  I hear from people who are using what they consider to be
> > > > "stable" Gnu/Linux systems, namely running RedHat 6.0 and/or RedHat
> > > > 6.1.  RedHat's kernel now ships with RAID patches and RAIDtools-0.90.
> > >
> > > Ok. If that's the case (I didn't know it), then the following proposal
> > > looks sensible to me:
> > >
> > > > What I really meant was that we should move the HOWTO's that aren't
> > > > being maintained, and focus on older software to an "unmaintained"
> > > > section or something, so that they are still available, but when
> > > > people look at them they realize that it's not necessarily current.
> > >
> > > Thanks for clarifying things
> > > /alessandro
> >
> > This is very diffucult to do as not all distrubutions are doing the same
> > thing and are running the same RAID or NFS patches in their kernel.  So
> > which distribution should the HOWTOs follow?  The answer is obviously
> > that we shouldn't shape things after one dist in particular period.  So
> > I see it as little and expected effort for the person begining to do
> > their homework as best they can to find out what they have before then
> > read and assume that the HOWTO applies to them perfectly.
> 
> Unfortunately, it's not all that easy for a novice to determine what
> they need from the documentation.  The only place that I can find on my
> RedHat 6.1 machine with anything that tells me that I need to patch my
> kernel is the .src.rpm for the kernel.  Since I wasn't very
> knowledgeable about the Software RAID on Linux when I started setting
> this up, I assumed that downloading the latest kernel would work with
> the tools that I got.  Now this is obviousally the fault of the people
> at RedHat, but it would be nice if the Software RAID HOWTO at my
> favorite documentation site at least had some information that could
> help me figure out why it didn't work.  Indeed, we should NOT model
> after any particular distribution, but in general, if we have HOWTOs
> that cover things that are wildly different from distribution to
> distribution (RAID, NFS), then perhaps we should try to have the HOWTOs
> contain info for the distributions.  This doesn't really involve the LDP
> per say, but rather the people who write and maintain the HOWTOs.  Some
> day when I learn how to install Debian, I will offer to write sections
> on that where it differs from RedHat (since I already know RedHat).  If
> other people do the same for SuSE, Caldera, Slackware and the others, if
> and when they differ, we can easily handle this.  Sorry for ranting on
> so long,
>         Greg


A command like this is a good place to start:

[brian@loki brian]$ rpm -qa |grep raid
raidtools-0.90-5                                                                

With RedHat and other distributions packaging their system in "packages"
of some type allows the new user to first find out what his distribution
comes with.  We would hope and for simplicity asume that RedHat or
whoever isn't going to ship raidtools .90 with a kernel that has older
raid code.  There is no OS out there that I know of that a novice can
just sit at and know everything without some work.  This means becoming
familiar with the system by work and then reading what they can before
asking some questions that a FAQ or a mailing list archive search might
answer.  So I agree that a novice will find it hard to determine a lot,
but I do expect them to try as hard as they can.  I've asked my fair
share of lame questions that were answered in a FAQ or something else. 
It's really hard to point the blame at anyone including RedHat.  They
updated the raid code in their release so that you, the user, could use
raid that works.  There are a lot of reasons for what RedHat did and as
to why the newer 2.2.x kernels don't have the newer raid code.  I'm not
going to debate which side is right.  But like someone said before on
the kernel list, if you are willing to build a kernel from source that
didn't come with your distribution you better first find out what
patches that distribution applied to the one they sent you.  I've seen
messages archived on redhat's site that list these patches.  That would
be a good place to start for a newbie of redhat.  For the other
distributions I can't say from first hand where to start.  There are a
lot more good things we all could be doing then there is time to do
them.  The info people need is out there if they look enough.
--
Brian D. Haymore
University of Utah
Center for High Performance Computing
155 South 1452 East RM 405
Salt Lake City, Ut 84112-0190

Email: brian@chpc.utah.edu - Phone: (801) 585-1755 - Fax: (801) 585-5366


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