Bug#398310: don't assemble all arrays on install

[martin f krafft]

severity 398310 important
retitle 398310 let user choose when to start which array
tags 398310 confirmed help
thanks

also sprach dean gaudet <dean at arctic.org> [2006.11.13.0230 +0100]:
> 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!

You can set AUTOSTART=false in /etc/default/mdadm or via debconf,
and no arrays will be started.

> 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?"

If you aren't happy with the current solution, please provide
patches for consideration.

I do like the idea of selecting which arrays to start when.
Ideally, for each array, you'd select whether to start it from
initramfs, from init.d at boot, from init.d at install time, or from
init.d run manually. You can distinguish between the latter three
using the runlevel and a custom variable passed from postinst.

In any case, I don't consider the bug you filed to be grave because
you forgot to zero the superblocks. However, I agree with you that
it would be nice to have more granular control. This won't happen in
time for etch though, nor do I know when I'll have time to implement
this. Thus, please help out if you want to see this feature.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at debian.org>
: :'  :  proud Debian developer, author, administrator, and user
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck - http://debiansystem.info
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
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