Kubuntu or Ubuntu and RAID 1?

[Michael Butash]

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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