Solution to RAID /boot issue in fc17?

[jdow]

On 2012/05/30 06:43, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Tue, 29 May 2012 23:02:14 -0400
> Sam Varshavchik<mrsam at courier-mta.com>  wrote:
>
>> Alex writes:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I believe the ability to have /boot on RAID was removed in fc15 so in
>>> fc16,
>>
>> That's news to me. Both F15 and F16 were perfectly happy with /boot on
>> RAID-1, for me. I must admit that they were quite reluctant to do so, and I
>> did have to beat the crap out of both of them; and I lost two good weekends
>> fighting their insolence, before they finally agreed to /boot off RAID-1.
>> But after I showed them who's the boss, there were no complaints.
>
> It's been officially removed repeatedly and works fine, at least on FC16.
> It does need to be RAID 1
>
>> There were two issues that made RAID-1 for /boot in F15 and F16 a nightmare.
>>
>> If your partition table starts at sector 63, you're most likely boned,
>> because grub2 too fat, with RAID-1 loaded.
>
> Thats complete crap. The Fedora installer is utterly broken here. Grub2
> is just fine. If you do the install by hand it all works fine.
>
>> Also, on some RAID-based system, anaconda kept generating a grub.conf that
>> was a complete work of fiction. That, of course, didn't help things either.
>> Fortunately, you can still boot in rescue mode, and run grub2-mkconfig to
>> regenerate a grub.conf that has some basis in reality.
>
> Count yourself lucky - if it can only find part of an old RAID volume eg
> a stale header the FC16 installer just crashed. FC17 has introduced a new
> bug where you can't install onto a degraded RAID1 array, which prevents
> all sorts of useful stuff working.
>
>> Now, if your partition table starts at sector 63, you're still boned. But
>
> Nope. You can do it by hand.
>
>> not quite. If you're running RAID-1, it is possible, with the help of a
>> rescue disk, and with stable UPS providing insurance, nurse the server into
>> restitching all the partitions so that they now start on sector 2048, one
>> disk at a time, without having to back them up, and redo.
>>
>> Bugzilla tells me that F17's anaconda has a better reputation in emitting
>> grub.conf for RAID-based system, so that's fixed. But, if your partitions
>> still start on sector 63, you're still boned. You must move them.
>
> Nope. You can do it by hand. It's just Fedora installer breakage and the
> rest is a myth of unknown origin.
>
> Basically the Fedora installer is a mess. It's been going downhill for
> years and it just gets worse each release. Unfortunately with FC17 you
> can't really avoid using it due to the giant re-arrangement of /bin
> and /usr/bin.
>
> It doesn't help that the standard procedure for handling Fedora installer
> bugs is close them wontfix.
>
> Alan

The big question here is whether this is infecting the RHEL installer or
not. I suspect install problems of this magnitude would really upset the
RHEL people. The only save would be to have the competition even worse.

{o.o}