On Fri November 20 2009 7:11:24 am Peter Nikolic wrote:
On Friday 20 Nov 2009 11:50:49 Lars M�ller wrote:
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A lot of the features are developed for the SUSE Linux Enterprise products. Should we keep them out of openSUSE to paint a nicer picture?
Well that actually is not a bad idea at all LVM just clutters things up on a desktop its a flaming pain to have the partitioner trrry to insist on using LVM even raid now is becoming less useful and in the home even for home servers sata drives are so darn huge now that raid is almost irrelevent
Actually, RAID is MORE important due to the large, cheap drives now available. Backups are nearly impossible using conventional means. So, simple copy to alternate drives, copy to internet backup services, etc, of multi TByte drive(s) is just not possible/practical. Thus, backups need to be to fault tolerant RAID arrays....if possible, on a second machine, but if not, then a 2nd RAID array on the same machine backing up a fault tolerant 1st RAID array. Backups are still very important for all the conventional reasons, but the larger the drives, the more likely backups will be difficult/impossible in a timely manner so fault tolerance buys time to allow the backup to complete successfully. I have (on all my machines), at least 2 RAID arrays, the primary array contains the OS and the 2nd contains the data. These arrays range from a few hundred Gig to multi Terrabyte in size, Raid1 and Raid5. The data is backed up to a 2nd machine via a high speed LAN Gigabit connection with also 2 raid arrays, one for its OS and one for the network backups, also RAID 5/6. The use of multiple computers each using RAID gives me fault tolerance AND backup with the backup being controlled via a product called CrashPlan, but could be effected via rsync/cron scripts. Today, with multimedia files and other multi-gigabyte datasets, Terrabyte sized drives are increasingly becoming the norm, even in home systems and with those large drives, data loss is inevitable without some form of fault tolerance such as that provided by RAID. I think it is very short-sighted to NOT include provisions for setting up support for RAID in oS or any distro of Linux for that matter. That RAID is used, or may be by Novell Enterprise products is not an argument for leaving it out of oS because increasingly, HOME users can benefit given the large, cheap drives and large datasets that are increasingly encountered by home users.
people keep on about faster boot times so you go banging space and time wasters like LVM and raid in the standard install .
The increase in boot time to start mdadm is negligable in my experience on my large system(s). Besides, if you're smart, you *never* shut your system down so you never have to reboot unless you are installing a new kernel or have a power failure and the UPS runs down.... I believe most computer hardware fails when power is reapplied, not during operation. That has been my experience at least. I have several machines that have NEVER been turned off except for hurricanes where I had to evacuate. One was on continuously for over 4.5 years until Hurricane Charlie forced me to evaculate and turn it off. Then we had one year where 3 hurricanes in the same year came across and we lost power. The 3rd time, one of the machines wouldn't come back up ... Years in the USAF as a RADAR repair technician convinced me of the above and personal experience hasn't changed my mind. I spend less time and money by leaving the equipment on, electricity is cheap compared to new hardware that fails and time and hardware repair/replacement costs considered, boot time is totally insignificant.
Pete . --
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