Replying to the comment just after Gordon's (I guess I need hierarchical comments, don't I ...).
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Yes, having two hosts with the same name is a real possibility. In Gordon's case it was two instances of the same host. Other cases should be fairly uncommon in the one data center though.
I'm not sure how best to deal with that. If mdadm is to reliably assemble one specific array as 'md0', then there needs to be some way for it to know which is the right md0. Aside from host name... what is there?
- Yes, having the same UUID on two arrays is a possibility not worth worrying about. So if you identify the md device by UUID then there is no problem. But people don't seem to want to do that. They want to mount '/dev/md0', not '/dev/md/xxxxx-yyyyyy-dddddd-qqqqqqq'.
- Maybe you are right. Maybe it is a boot/mount problem, not an md assemble problem. Maybe I should have an option that assembles all arrays that are found, assigning random unit numbers to each, then rely on mount-by-uuid or similar to mount the right filesystem. That might work for some people, but some people won't like it
- I suspect it won't be very long before you cannot use linux without an initrd. It really is the way of the future, and fighting against it is not going to get you anywhere. Much better to embrace it, steer it, and make it work for you. It is a bit like 'udev'. It might not be perfect but it is here to stay.
Thanks for your input.
