Package: mdadm Version: 2.5.5-1 Severity: grave it's dangerous to generate an mdadm.conf and start running arrays automatically at install time! i nearly got bit by this.
i marked this grave because there's a potential for data loss with the current install scripts. i had 4 disks which i had experimented with sw raid10 on a few months back... i never zeroed the superblocks. i ended up putting them into production in a 3ware hw raid10. today the 3ware freaked out... and i put the disks into another box to attempt forensics and to try constructing *read-only* software arrays to see if i could recover the data. when i did "apt-get install mdadm" it found the old superblocks from my experiments a few months ago... and tried to start the array! fortunately i had issued "blockdev --setro /dev/sd[defg]" prior to doing any of this, so the block layer saved my ass. otherwise mdadm would have happily screwed around with the data at the end of the disks... and *even worse* might have decided recovery was necessary and really screwed things up! it's *bad* to autostart all discovered arrays. it's unfortunate enough that you've decided to make initrds start all arrays by default... but at least this install-time autodiscover and start everything should be optional. at a minimum i think there should be a dialog "attempt to autodiscover all arrays and start them?". even better would be a second step "i found the following arrays, which ones should i start?" -dean p.s. regardless of this complaint, i'm totally happy with the newer initramfs which handles renames more gracefully... and with the monthly checkarray default. thanks! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
