[CentOS] CentOS 7: software RAID 5 array with 4 disks and no spares?

[Chris Murphy]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 4:20 PM,  <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote:
> Niki Kovacs wrote:
>> Le 18/02/2015 23:12,

>> close, but then, for mysterious reasons, Red Hat decided to cripple it
>> into oblivion. Go figure.
>
> One word: desktop. That's what they want to conquer next.

OK well there's a really long road to get to that pie in the sky. I
don't see it happening because it seems there's no mandate to
basically tell people what they can't have, instead it's well, we'll
have a little of everything.

Desktop OS that are the conquerers now? Their installers don't offer
100's of layout choices. They offer 1-2, and they always work rock
solid, no crashing, no user confusion, essentially zero bugs. The code
is brain dead simple, and that results in stability.

*shrug*

Long road. Long long long. Tunnel. No light. The usability aspects are
simply not taken seriously by the OS's as a whole. It's only taken
seriously by DE's and they get loads of crap for every change they
want to make. Until there's a willingness to look at 16 packages as a
whole rather than 1 package at a time, desktop linux has no chance.
The very basic aspects of how to partition, assemble, and boot and
linux distro aren't even agreed upon. Fedora n+1 has problems
installing after Fedora n. And it's practically a sport for each
distro to step on an existing distros installer. This is
technologically solved, just no one seems to care to actually
implement something more polite.

OS X? It partitions itself, formats a volume, sets the type code,
writes some code into NVRAM, in order to make the reboot automatically
boot the Windows installer from a USB stick. It goes out of it's way
to invite the foreign OS.

We can't even do that with the same distro, different version. It
should be embarrassing but no one really cares enough to change it.
It's thankless work in the realm of polish. But a huge amount of
success for a desktop OS comes from polish.


> We also pretty much don't use any drives under 1TB. The upshot is we had
> custom scripts for > 500GB, which made 4 partitions - /boot (1G, to fit
> with the preupgrade), swap (2G), / (497G - and we're considering
> downsizing that to 250G, or maybe 150G) and the rest in another partition
> for users' data and programs. The installer absolutely does *not* want to
> do what we want. We want swap - 2G - as the *second* partition. But if we
> use the installer, as soon as we create the third partition, of 497GB, for
> /, it immediately reorders them, so that / is second.

I'm open to having my mind changed on this, but I'm not actually
understanding why it needs to be in the 2nd slot, other than you want
it there, which actually isn't a good enough reason. If there's a good
reason for it to be in X slot always, for everyone, including
anticipating future use, then that's a feature request and it ought to
get fixed. But if it's a specific use case, well yeah you get to
pre-partition and then install.

-- 
Chris Murphy