System Administration

I have been using Ubuntu on various desktops lately; it is one of the most polished Linux distributions I have ever used from a desktop refinement standpoint. However, Ubuntu's desktop refinement appears to only be skin deep.

The Ubuntu developers tend to make major changes right before release time without adequate testing; Hoary's last minute Gnome update, the many issues I've had getting Dapper to work with most video cards (only one machine I've tested on so far works with the LiveCD without using safe mode, two have required the alternative install), and the PowerPC LiveCD installer crashing on yaboot thus making the LiveCD installer quite useless on that platform.

All of these issues were quite obvious, happen either every time or extremely often, and would have been caught with even the most rudimentary of testing. Apparently this lack of testing extends to their updates as well. If I had not noticed their past pattern of not testing before release, I would find it rather amazing that such an update, which kills X11 on their two most major platforms so consistently, slipped through.

It is absolutely critical to use data scrubbing with Linux software RAID. If you fail to do so, when one of the drives fail and the new one is put in place to resync with, the chance of losing all data is very high. When Linux resyncs a RAID array, it steps through each and every block on the disk(s) it is syncing from. If there are any bad blocks on the 'good' drives data scrubbing hasn't found (or data scrubbing isn't being used), that drive will also be marked as unusable. This renders your array useless unless an array is in use that can recover from multiple drive failures at the same time, or you have quite a few days to spend on manual recovery.

See this information on how to do data scrubbing with Linux RAID for another description and instructions on how to do this.