mdadm and raidtools

[Warren Togami]

Matthias Saou wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just tried mdadm yesterday on Fedora development, and it works really
> great with software RAID1 and the test failures I made on my arrays ;-) I
> really encourage everyone who's already tried software RAID to check it
> out.
> 

I totally concur.  Out of necessity I recently needed to convert remote 
servers from non-RAID to software RAID-1, and mdadm was the only way to 
do it since raidtools are incapable of making degenerate RAID1 arrays. 
I then had problems rebooting safely into the RAID1 array, but that went 
away after I totally erased raidtools from /etc/rc.sysinit and instead 
added some two lines for mdadm.  (my approach used mdadm.conf, but there 
could easily be auto-detect functionality something like Debian 
currently uses.)  While on the topic, make sure you reinstall GRUB onto 
BOTH disks after doing a crazy thing like what I did...

> Two things, though :
> - The init script seem to be missing two "echo" lines, one after "success
> $"mdadm"" and another after "failure $"mdadm"" in order to have a proper
> new line in the output. BTW, the script is really hack-ish as mentioned
> inside ;-)

Hmm, I hope it is doing the mdadm with proper auto-detect method...

> - As the raidtools package was removed from what-will-become FC2, shouldn't
> mdadm contain an "Obsoletes: raidtools <= 1.00.3-6" in order for upgrades
> through apt or yum to get things right? Adding the latest packaged version
> to the obsoletes allows later reintroduction of raidtools if needed without
> problems.
> 
> Maybe worth bugzilla'ing, I just wanted to know if people had some thoughts
> about this.

Totally in agreement.  If you bugzilla this, please CC me.

Warren