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

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 19.02.2015 06:28, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 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.

I think the problem is that you simply have to draw a distinction
between technology and product.
The rise of the Linux desktop will never happen because Linux is not a
product but a technology and as a result has to be a jack of all trades.
The reason Apple is so successful I believe is because they understood
more than others that people don't care about technology but want one
specific consistent experience. They don't core how the harddisk is
partitioned.
So I can see the rise of the "X desktop" but only if X is willing to
have its own identity an eschew the desire to be compatible with
everything else or cater to both casual users and hard-core admin types.
In other words the "X Desktop" would have to be a very opinionated
product rather than a highly flexible technology.

>> 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.
> 

When I was younger I cared about where exactly each partition was
positioned but nowadays I refer to all my file systems using the uuid so
I don't really care anymore if / is the second or fifth partition. The
same is true for network interfaces. Since I mostly deal with physical
interfaces on Hypervisors only these days and there I am more interested
in bridges rather than the nics themselves I couldn't care less if the
interface is named eth0 or enp2something. I tend to think more in terms
of logical resources these days rather than physical ones.

Regards,
  Dennis