A FC6 suggestion.

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-05-06 at 18:29, Thomas Cameron wrote:
>>> Unfortunately no one seems to be interested in that kind
>>> of cooperation.  If a disto does add something it wants it
>>> to be unique to their version and a reason to use only
>>> that version.  However, I'm not interested in being married
>>> to only one distribution so I stick to dd / tar and the
>>> things that work everywhere and simply complain about
>>> the way different unix flavors have always kept their
>>> differences to the detriment of acceptance
>> Les -
>>
>> If you use dd, that means you have two disks in a functioning system.  
>> After the fact why don't you re-label
>>  the one you will moving?
> 
> Then you have to also adjust grub and /etc/fstab to match on
> every box with opportunities for typos.  Normally I just change
> the one I'm going to use as the master to use partition names
> instead of labels and then it doesn't matter whether the copy
> operation is by dd'ing the whole disk or tar/cp/rsync by
> filesystem.  It isn't that difficult to work around, but it
> seems like everyone who works with more than a few machines is
> going to be surprised by this issue eventually.
> 
Well, if you are using dd to copy a working disk image, you are
going to have to make more changes anyway. You may have problems
with the host name, depending on how it is set. You may also have a
problem in that the MAC address of the NIC will not match the one in
the ifcfg-eth? script and/or /etc/iftab (Depending on the
distribution.) The use of labels was started because there were too
many newbies that would move the drive, and then not be able to boot
it. One common problem was where they would have two drives, in the
machine, one with Windows and one with Linux with Linux on a drive
other then the Windows drive. Then they would decide to move the
Linux drive to its own machine, and it would not work. When using
labels, all you have to do is re-install the boot loader, and maybe
tweak the config for it. When using the actual devices, you have to
edit /etc/fstab as well.

Then you have the problem of moving things on a SCSI controller, or
adding another SCSI controller. Or even better, using a SCSI
controller on something like a Sparc Station where the mapping of
the SCSI drives changes when you add an external drive. (The
internal drive has an id of 3 after boot, but is the boot drive.)

Correct me if I am wrong, but if I remember right, you can decide
what system you want to use in the advanced section of the install.
If you are going to install a bunch of systems by cloning the drive
from an installed system, you should look into things like that. The
installer defaults to what will work for most people. If you plan on
doing something other then a standard install, you have to expect to
tweak some of the advanced settings.

I feel that the default install should make things as easy as
possible for a newbie, doing a normal install, and have the advanced
options for when you are not doing a standard install. If you are
not doing a standard install, expect to have to use some of the
advanced options. Installing on one machine, and cloning the install
is NOT a standard install!

Now, one change that would help is the way duplicate labels are
handled. Right now, the last label found of the duplicates found is
used. It would be better if the first one were used, with the
scanning starting on the first drive. If the same label is found on
a later drive, it should be ignored. That would take care the
problem of taking a drive from another machine and adding it to a
working machine. (If you make the drive from the other machine the
boot drive, you may have problems, but you will have problems any way.)

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!