On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 8:19 PM, Konstantin Olchanski
<[log in to unmask]> 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