When Windows was better than Linux | Hacker News Reader

When Windows was better than Linux

theweaselking.livejournal.com

22 pointsAndrewDucker14 comments

That should be "When Windows was better than Linux". The author is saying that 3.5 years ago it was harder to set up RAID on Linux than on Windows. In a comment he clarifies that he is comparing 3.5 year old Linux to 3.5 year old Windows.

That makes it hard to see what the point of the post was. There would have been a point in such a post 3.5 years ago. Today, it seems to be a waste of time.

What are the steps required today on Linux?

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/first /dev/second

Strangely, I think it was exactly the same 3 years ago. At least I don't remember doing anything complicated then. Although I did go via /etc/raidtab and mkraid.

(I'm skipping over all the required apt-get / yum installs and creating the partitions with fdisk - this are of course standard simple dependencies)

Edit: just noticed that there was a link to the previous post... where the guy did exactly this. The rest of the post is formatting the partitions, installing needed software, configuring grub, etc. I see his point, but I'm not sure I agree with it. Part of the original title "... To Run RAID-1 When You Didn't Plan For That Originally" sums it up. If you know how to handle partitions and how to configure your system in general, raid is just a one line difference. If someone gave me a windows box, I'd probably spend just as much time clicking around trying to figure out how to manage disks :)

He has the running / on /dev/first, he's migrating that to a degraded array of just /dev/second then bringing /dev/first in to complete the array.

The 3.5 year old steps are equally valid today for many and probably most cases. Been there done that and I'd never do it again; the cost of the hard drive isn't worth the blood pressure and strong drink this kind of juggling causes.

IFF the machine was set up with LVM (and there's a single VG with the right properties) you could build the MD array degraded, add it as a PV under LVM and migrate the data at that layer[0] then nuke the old drive and add it to the array. I believe you could even do it without rebooting but I've never tried. Additionally, making distros boot from LVM isn't always straightforward, at minimum you'd probably have to get your hands dirty with grub.

That said both BTRFS and zfs are (theoretically) "windows easy" for this case, once you're booting from them you can add mirrors to your heart's content and things should Just Work.

[0] http://www.greyoak.com/lvmdrive.html

If you're accustomed to "right-clicking" to accomplish tasks, I'd imagine that much of Linux system administration is opaque to you. That, however, does not make it "better".

I don't mean that to sound snarky. I just think it's important to recognize that though the mouse may be one man's treasure, but it is another man's ball and chain.

If you look at the link to the original post about doing it on Linux, you can see the steps that were necessary to go through. If the Linux method had been as simple, but required the command line, it wouldn't have been noteworthy...

How common is this, really, though? It's pretty rare that someone actually converts an existing single disk setup into a RAID. It's far more common to add/remove/replace devices in an existing array. These tasks have always been fairly trivial with the mdadm tool. The most sane way to accomplish this under Linux is to create a broken mirror with the new device (device B), synchronize device A's contents to the array with dd, and then add device A to the array.

The argument could be made that it's rare precisely because it's distinctly not trivial to do.

He does what you describe except using cp instead of dd.

There is still the need for digging in man pages and searching for the right switches in Linux/whatever this is just an echo to how you can't simply throw more switches at a problem without a hierarchy of some sort. An ideal structure would be function based and inter-operable between differing programs via standardized boxes (as in boxed values in programming to json, whatever), a stream of text is not structured data contrary to popular belief. This would require a new operating system which is beyond this already lengthly comment.

Personally i think its all about familiarity. Things are easier in the OS you're familiar with.

For me i only use windows for games, everything else is a chore, because i love linux and to me linux is much easier to deal with. Equally however, a friend of mine is a die hard windows guy, even uses IE as his browser and hes a pretty competent computer guy, and while to me thats utter preposterousness to me, it works for him.

> It took several hours of research, several hours of work, four reboots, a near heart attack, and inspired heavy drinking.

Just because he didn't know how to do it, doesn't mean that Linux is worse than Window. Just because you speak English doesn't make <insert other language here> worse.

The Linux-way, for comparison:

http://linuxconfig.org/Linux_Software_Raid_1_Setup

Disclaimer: I've not read through it all and not set up Raid-1 on Linux, but it seems to be a way of setting up Raid-1.

A comment on the page:

"...I'm annoyed at Windows software raid because they restrict it to the more expensive versions, so I can't use it on my gaming PC."

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