Dale posted on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 13:42:37 -0500 as excerpted: > James Le Cuirot wrote: >> On Sat, 9 Apr 2016 12:09:38 -0400 waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote: >> >>>> I never really got the mentality that using an initramfs is a burden. >>> One more piece of software that can go wrong. You have to >>> maintain+configure it; e.g. sync software and library versions with >>> what's on the rest of the system. >> Errm, have you ever actually used dracut? >> >> dracut --kver 4.5 >> >> Wow, that was hard! It requires zero configuration and that's true even >> if you've got LVM on top of LUKS on top of RAID or something equally >> complex. If you're already running that kernel version, you don't even >> need to specify it. >> > FYI. I've had those to fail too. As Walt said, just one more thing to > fail.
And more to the point, if all you know about dracut is dracut --kver 4.5, then you're not going to be able to _fix_ those failures. Some years ago I tried lvm2 as well as mdraid. I quickly ejected lvm2 from my system and future plans (keeping mdraid), because it was simply too complex for me as an admin to be confident in my ability to work with it without fat-fingering something, under the extreme pressure of a disaster recovery situation, possibly without proper access to manpages and other documentation due to the disaster recovery I was working thru. Waltdnes has a point, the same point I learned then. As a responsible admin, if the system's too complex to be understood well enough to be confident in one's ability to restore in a disaster recovery situation with limited or no access to manpages and similar documentation, it's too complex. A reasonable system is one you understand well enough to confidently manage it in those sorts of situations. Otherwise it's simply too complex for your skill level as an admin. And understanding an initr* well enough to confidently deal with a disaster recovery situation, possibly/likely without access to documentation (it's a disaster recovery, after all!) is definitely *well* beyond "dracut --kver 4.5" level, so he's very right to be worried about it. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
