Comment 26 for bug 290885

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 1:07 AM, Bill Smith <email address hidden> wrote:
> OK, so the test seemed to go ok (aside from my BIOS trying to boot from
> my 'data' drives).

Great, your efforts here, Bill, are greatly appreciated, and were
instrumental in helping us get these patches from my PPA and into
hardy-proposed.

> OBSERVATIONS
> - As you suggested I ran the update command on just the boot array,
> > sudo grub-install /dev/md0
> It correctly identified the two physical drives and updated them both
> - The initial boot (still both drives) was fine. But then it hung on shutdown?

Hung on shutdown? Hmm, that's probably a separate bug. If you can
reproduce this regularly, please let me know and we can look at filing
another bug.

> Tried another boot-and-shutdown and this time it shutdown ok.

This time it worked? Is it reproducible then?

> - 1st test boot (with drive #2 removed). There was the expected 2-min delay
> before prompting to boot degraded. The prompt timed-out before I could finish
> reading the screen so I unintentionally did the "Answer no" test?

That timeout is set to 15 seconds ... I suppose we can lengthen that,
if it's really necessary.

> Rebooted, waited, then entered Yes and it booted normally.
> - 2nd test boot (with drive #1 removed). Same behavior as previous test.
> - 3rd test boot (both drives reconnected). Booted on drive #1 and was able to use
> 'mdadm --add' command(s) to restore both arrays successfully.

Great! Thanks.

> COMMENTS
> - is there a way to simplify the message screen? Maybe add section headers so that
> you can immediately see what each section is about.

Well, yes and no... I believe this screen is significantly improved
in Intrepid. However, we are very limited as to what we can do with a
previously existing release, such as Hardy. Specifically, we need to
fix the current bug (booting degraded raid) and only the current bug
without breaking or affecting anything else. I took this to mean
leaving the screens and messages alone. My apologies that I can
really do more.

> - does the prompt need to have a timer?

Yes, absolutely. You can configure your machine to either boot
degraded, or not, with dpkg-reconfigure mdadm. The default behavior
is BOOT_DEGRADED=no, which matches the existing behavior of Ubuntu
Hardy and before.

This prompt allows you to select a different behavior, the first time
you boot after a raid degrade event. If you don't make a selection,
it will obey whatever you have set in your mdadm configuration.

> - is there a single command that could be entered at the Busybox prompt to
> manually initiate the proper boot-as-degraded script? If so, can the system display it after
> you select 'No' (or time-out) ?

Hmm, yes, but it's not that simple. That's what my patches do for
you--handles that somewhat complex set of operations.

> - why doesn't Partition Editor (Gparted) recognize 'md' devices? Probably unrelated to this backport

No idea. Yes, unrelated to this patchset.

> but you seem like the person to ask! On this 8.04.1+ system my Gparted v0.3.5 says,
> "kernel is unable to re-read the partitiontables on /dev/md0"

I usually use fdisk /dev/md0. That certainly works.

> If you're not supposed to use Gparted to edit raid devices, it would be nice if it directly told you so
> and maybe offered to let you view them in read-only mode.

fdisk -l and mdadm --detail should get you most of the way there. I
hope that most people doing software raid have at least rudimentary
knowledge of fdisk/mdadm, or can at least read the relevant manpages.

> - There's a typo in one of the modules. When I shutdown I saw a command-line message,
> "Network Manager: caught terminiation"

Thanks, again, that's one you'll need to file against Network Manager.

> Finally, after I ran these tests (yesterday and today), I was prompted by Update Manager that there was another update for 'initramfs-tools' and 'mdadm' -- was that from you? I didn't want to install them until I knew they weren't a wrong version. They didn't have any Description or Version info in Update Manager, but Synaptic identified them:
> - initiramfs 0.85eubuntu39.3~ppa4
> - mdadm 2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59-3ubuntu4~ppa4
>
> Are they new updates that you want me to re-run the test with, after
> downloading them?

Right. Those are from my PPA. You can tell by the "~ppa" appended to
the end of the versioning. And if my ppa is the only one in your
/etc/apt/sources.list, then, yes, they definitely came from me ;-)

The "ppa4" indicates that I went through a few iterations. I made a
few minor tweaks, simplifying the patches, updating the changelog,
etc. Each time I uploaded a new one to my PPA, I had to bump the
version number.

---

Once again, Bill, thank you so much for your hard work!

:-Dustin