Re: Too many Recommends (in particular on mail-transport-agent)
On May 31, 2017 3:51:33 AM EDT, Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> wrote:
>On Wed, 31 May 2017 at 00:20:18 +0000, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
>> AFAIK, mdadm's default (and maybe only supported, without some custom
>> scripting) way to report a degraded array is email.
>
>Can't it report this via the system log? (syslog, systemd-journald)
The kernel already does, but of course the system log has a lot of messages, every several seconds on some systems. And the systemd journal can be even worse, volume-wise.
Logs are great for figuring out what happened after the fact, but what it needs is an alert. Immediate action must be taken, data is at risk.
It would be great it we had an alert program to use instead of email (and that program would make sure the user/admin is aware via persistent desktop alert, email, whatever). I think it's been discussed before... If we had one, it'd be relatively easy to have mdadm, smartmontools, etc. use it.
>
>> OTOH, seems weird for Dracut to recommend mdadm. Surely a system
>> booting from RAID would already have it installed?
>
>dracut defaults to creating a general-purpose initramfs that is not
>meant
>to hard-code anything and can be used to boot "most" hardware
I'm not really familiar with Dracut, but I'll note that needing mdadm is almost always a property of the OS install being booted, not of the hardware it's running on. So not including mdadm doesn't make the particular install any less portable, though it does make the initramfs less general to booting arbitrary installs.
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