Ubuntu has made themselves the self appointed champion of the stupid IMHO. They have decided along time ago that they want everything done the simplest pay possible, and automatically. And for someone that does not know better... Like my mom... this setup is perfect.

But...

If you are to the point of wanting your system your way, its time to upgrade your distro to something a little more professional. Personally, I have ditched *buntu for just this reason. On my personal machines, or machines that I will be maintaining remotely, I have switched to Arch. Arch puts the control back in my hands. I can keep with the default rolling bleeding edge distro, or go with the more conservative LTS packages... I can decide how and when I want to stray from the standard packages with AUR (Arch User Repository, I use yaourt for this) or tailoring package options using ABS (Arch Build System, for example Arch VIM package does not include python scripting by default, as a general rule, I use NerdTree, Tags, and ConqueTerm in my VIM environment, and this requires Python... ABS allows me to download the package, turn that feature back on, compile, and install my "tweaked" version of VIM).

But Arch is not for amateurs. I would never put my mom on Arch for example. This distro expects that you know what you are doing. But, if you have the skill, you will completely avoid the decision making of Red Hat/Suse/Canonical/etc. This distro for the most part keeps things very clean, and expects that YOU will tweak things as you desire.

Just my $0.02

Kevin Fries

On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 7:12 AM, Michael Butash <michael@butash.net> wrote:

This is one of the main reasons I stopped using Ubuntu actually, they've actually gone out of their way to make raid assembly now difficult, purposely removing mdraid capability from the default desktop kernel initrd for no discernible reason.

This leads to major caveats doing raid1 in just about every way now using ubuntu, meaning you now have to install mdadm from a desktop image, build the raid manually, trick the installer pre-building the os filesystem under /target, and then letting it rip with installing, making sure to fix your mdadm.conf before reboot. If doing crypto or lvm, you have to layer in fixing the crypttab file, etc from a vty shell.

This also occurs under the server installer now because the mdadm pkg isn't default built into their initrd at all, and the debian-installer dump of the fs doesn't include the raid, so a reboot tends to die unless added to the chroot install before reboot (surprise!). This never used to be an issue prior when it was "just in there" with cryptsetup and lvm. Why they made a conscious decision to remove this befuddles me, other than to say they specifically want to make the desktop *enterprise unfriendly*. Apparently they don't want to compete with RedHat and Suse giving users the option of security or redundancy.

There's also a pretty big chicken and egg issue I found that breaks setting up ubuntu desktop metapkg after the fact with normal dpkg processing that breaks recursion of packages if you try to just set it up during a chroot of the alt/server desktop. Since I have to hit the shell and fix their crap installer anyways, but there are packages that will fail to install from desktop packages, insisting on using upstart itself to install, but doesn't exist yet, leaving the desktop half-broken, and breaks your repos in an unfixable situation until you can force remove the package during a "normal" install where upstart is present.

This is EXACTLY what got me to stop using ubuntu, as my default installation does this, if nothing else than to optimize around my SSD's for chunk/block/extent sizing outside defaults for ^2 sector disks. It'd be great if the installs could auto-detect ssd's to setup differently, but no distribution does I've found today. It's also funny about wanting to format pre-formatted disks unless you assemble them in a certain order, insisting on reformatting your fs (without stride flags and block sizing I just used with ext).

Surprising Mint Debian has a mode during graphic install that just says "let me know when you're done assembling your fs under /target to install", which is optimal, but doesn't setup your fstab, crypttab, mdadm.conf at all, which most users might freak out on to diy. It's still less of a kludge than ubuntu, which ass-u-me's it is intelligent, and actually isn't.

In any regard, there isn't a good situation to deal with logical-based disks and enterprise features on about any debian-based desktop installer since ubuntu killed the alt desktop install and hobbled their initrd's of the modules by default.

-mb

On 07/28/2014 02:43 AM, Phil Waclawski wrote:
There no longer seems to be any alternative CDs/DVDs etc for Ubuntu/Kubuntu that support software raid during the installation.

I've seen several pages that talk about how to set it up, but it assumes you have an alternative DVD.

Any suggestions of places I should look?

Phil Waclawski
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