On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 8:19 PM, Konstantin Olchanski <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 03:54:18PM -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: >> >> Hilarity ensued. I had to explain to several engineers, for both VM's >> and for repurposing hardware, that you should really clear the first >> blocks of a disk before handing it off to an installer, precisely to >> clear this and other kinds of confusion. >> > > First few blocks is not good enough. I had trouble with RHEL/SL installer > finding some old md raid signatures or superblocks or something and refusing > to use the disk (after asking and answering all the installer question, > injury+insult).
How much did you have to clear? And I sympathize. > The installer must have a button for "yes, I want to use this disk, yes, I > know > it has/had some data, yes, I am know what I am doing, just use this disk > already". The difficulty is that anaconda has become a python nightmare of complexity, coupled with an unnecessary GUI of complexity. New features of sophisticated interaction and "pretty pictures" ti nabage LVM, various clustering filesystems, and network installation have been added as desired, but it's easy to lose site of simple steps like "just present the names of disks. > But people who write installers have no brains. How else you explain > multiple disks being presented as "you have 6 disks: wdc, wdc, wdc, wdc, wdc > and wdc, > you *must* chose the right one to install the bootloader". (some installers > helpfully tell you the disk size, so you know which one of the identically > listed "6tb wdc disk" to use). Aparently the thinking is that presenting users That one actually has a reason. "wdc, sda, xvdb, etc., etc." is all sensitive to the order reposrted by the disk controllers and can be re-ordered by various motherboard settings or the presence or absence of detachable media. > with disk serial numbers will confuse them (and forger about telling them > the physical SATA ports or SATA topology). I agree that this would be potentially very helpoful. The newer installers are classic cases of open source interfaces based on "look how clever we are!" rather than "can Aunt Tillie use this?", or even on "if an expert needs to poke around, are the settings accessible". I'll point to Eric Raymond's guidelines on open source GUI's in his essay "The Luxury of Ignorance", along with the guidelines someone sent in a postscript, at http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html > -- > Konstantin Olchanski > Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow! > Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca > Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada
