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I have a home server I built several years ago. It used to be a mail server, but now it's mainly just a home file server. Still, it runs a three-drive RAID 5 array for safety. Recently, one of the drives failed and I decided it was time to replace the whole array (as it was old spinning disk drives and those are so early-2010s).

You'd think this would be easy, and it would be, if documentation for it were any good. The best I could find skipped over some rather important details, which I had to figure out from extensive Duck Duck Going and the friendly folks in the #ubuntu channel on irc.libera.chat. Much of this is derived from this tutorial, but with a lot more detail here.

So that I don't have to re-research all of this next time, and hopefully to help someone else in a similar situation, I'm going to document the whole process here in detail, with descriptions. This isn't quite a blow-by-blow, since I am not going to include all of my missteps along the way, but it's close.

Buckle up.

I've been a Linux user for 20 years, and Linux-primary for about 15 years. That puts me in the minority in most groups, even among developers who these days are still mostly Mac-o-philes if they're non-Windows. For that entire time, it's been a running gag that "this will be the year of the Linux desktop." And, of course, it never is. Whatever that means.

Guess what, we're now in the age of Linux. On the desktop. But it's not what you thought, and probably not what you wanted.

Recently, Gentoo documented what they view as the Composer Problem: Basically, PHP projects using Composer can't be packaged the way they want to package it, with system-level shared libraries. This is not a new complaint; Other distributions have complained about Composer's impact before. But fundamentally I think the issue stems from having the wrong mental model of how modern PHP works when viewed from a distribution or sysadmin perspective.

Pay It Forward was a 2000 romantic drama featuring Kevin Spacey, Haley Joel Osment, and Helen Hunt. Decently well-received, I found it a good, heart-warming, thought-provoking movie.

It is also an allegory for how open source works.

As Drupal gets bigger and bigger in the marketplace, it is moving into areas where system administrators still hold sway. Dedicated servers or server farms have a different set of needs than a shared host when it comes to monitoring and performance.

That's not even Drupal specific. For any high-end web app, it's useful to be able to interact with it for administrative purposes through standard system tools. On Windows, that's the Windows Administrative Tools or IIS. On LAMP, that could be a unified web app like webmin or a KDE control panel plugin or a Gnome applet. Getting a web app into certain organizations requires offering existing sysadmins a way to integrate it into their existing management workflow.

But what pieces of the app do sysadmins want in their existing admin tools? Calling all sysadmins, what do you want from us? :-)

Dries has been commenting recently, both on his blog and elsewhere, about one of the chief advantages of using open source: All developers/users are on equal footing. If you try to learn a proprietary app or framework, you know what the main developer feels like deigning to let you know. Anything else is either a mystery or, in some cases, illegal for you to find out (if there's any encryption or copy-prevention involved). You can never be as good an expert as the author, because the author has access to the Holy Book (code) and you don't. With an open source project, everyone gets the same access to the code. The only thing stopping you from being the best expert on the planet is your own skills and time.

He's very right about why you should choose to use an open source project. But what about why you should start one, or release your own code open source? As a developer, that's a far more interesting question for me.

Over on the Planet, someone posted a link to a budding Drupal user who was having the usual first-time-user troubles. "I want to do X, Y, Z, but I can't figure out how and no one will tell me, help!" Been there, done that, I suppose. But how can that be if there's so much Drupal documentation? Simple. The questions most people ask are the hardest to answer, because there isn't just one kind of documentation.

So it seems Ubuntu, a distribution I have grown to like more and more of late (especially every time something breaks in Debian Sid), has decided that init has got to go. Their answer? Not any of the various attempts to replace it in the past, but once again start from scratch with something called Upstart. While I agree that init is one of the many parts of typical GNU/Linux system that desperately needs to grow out of the 1970s, I'm not sure that Upstart is the right way to do it.