----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrew Joakimsen" <joakimsen@gmail.com>

Otherwise you can try (and fail) to make mdadm work... it does not.

Well, it doesn't work for you. It works fine for me and gee, rather a lot of other people. Since that's the case, you can't say it doesn't work. All you can say is you can't figure it out. Every thing you've claimed in the past to be impossible in mdadm, I have done, and then some, and I can just about barely spell "mdadm". I actually don't use it all that much. Sitting there issuing wrong commands because you've misinterpreted the manual and can't be bothered to figure out the things the manual isn't clear on, and then claiming the tool doesn't work is pretty dumb. I struggled for a little bit at first too. I misinterpreted some things the man page says too. But my reaction to this was a bit different from what yours seems to have been. I googled around for other peoples similar problems and I simply tried things on test disks (which btw can be merely ramdisks, you don't even need to invest in any hardware except when testing bios/boot interactions) and figured out by simple testing those things the manual wasn't clear on. In the end, what I found was that I could do things, and recover broken arrays, in mdadm that I could not do with adaptec or lsi or 3ware hardware raid cards, because of the much higher amount of control mdadm allows. This all took between a day and a weekend off & on. A lot longer than it takes to use a hardware raid card. However, the other side is a lifetime of being helpless and dependant. In fact, I'd say that's basically the job of an IT person all day every day their whole career, is to figure things out on the spot. If you can't do that and require that everything be done for you, then get out of IT. The problem here is, because there are a lot of details and factors that change the equation in every idividual case, it's pretty difficult to diagnose and fix md raid problems via mail list. At least for me. Also, in my own case, since I'm NOT an md raid expert and I always sove my own md raid problems by a fair amount of trial and direct experimentation, it's difficult to offer exact commands via mail list. The exact commands I issued one time to solve a particular problem, I already know that they were only correct in that exact situation and in the context of things I knew about the data on the disk that no program or firmware could possibly deduce or assume. The same command would be disaster any other time. _That_ may be a valid argument against average Joe using md raid, the lack of really good community support to make everything fast and effortless. But, that doesn't mean it's broken, just that it's not user-friendly. The most powerful things are often not user-friendly. -- Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++. filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org