Feizhou wrote:
The bootloader has always been a weak spot for RH installs. I remember back in the 4.x and 5.x days I always just assumed that it wouldn't get it right and considered a rescue boot and /usr/sbin/lilo to be just another part of the installaion! ;-)
grub is done properly in FC5 so we can expect the same for RHEL5 and therefore Centos 5.
I just looked at the boot sector on the 3 machines that I have running software raid1. It looks like the installer got it right on all 3. IIRC, one was installed as CentOS 4.1, another as 4.2, and another as 4.3.
Hard to believe the upstream provider of an Enterprise Class OS could allow raid bootloader configuration to not work on a very large percentage of machines for very long without there being hell to pay, and big headlines in the trade journals.
Just to get my comment in on linux RAID reliability, like others who have commented, I was using Linux software raid back in 1999ish (RH 6.2) for both boot and root. It worked very well. My only complaint was that it wasn't supported by the installer and so it required a fair amount of jiggery-pokery to get it configured. I then started ordering the PERC controllers with the Dell servers we buy. I've had more trouble with them actually. You just never know when support for your (not so old) controller is going to get silently dropped. (To be fair, my negative experiences along these lines have been with FC and those guys don't seem to care what they break or when it gets fixed.)
Since I've switched to CentOS, I've been using software raid1 and everything seems to be working as advertised, including the support for /boot and / raid in the the installer.
-Steve