gpt installs in OpenSuSE 10.2 ... grrrrrr

Suppose you have a x86_64 box, I dunno, able to put 8+TB usable in 3U. Suppose you want to load OpenSuSE 10.2 on it. Suppose you want to keep the partitioning simple, and not do any fancy tricks to eek out another few percentage of performance, so you build your RAID6 with 2 hot spares. Now you have this big hunk-a-chunk-a disk. Now install OpenSuSE 10.2 on it. After you are done you discover ….

… it wrote an msdos label to the disk. Not a gpt label. Which means you have to go back and do it again … though … OpenSuSE 10.2 doesn’t actually write GPT labels to disk. You have to get into rescue mode, then parted /dev/somethingorother mklabel gpt sync, reboot, rinse twice, … and then during partitioning, it cautions you about using gpt. Yeah, this is helpful. As soon as Tiburon is done, I am going to automate the loading of these types of units (mostly done, I haven’t had time to finish while I am working on other revenue/… projects) so I don’t have to mess around with design errors and bugs. I’ll file a bug report with the OpenSuSE folks. I don’t expect them to fix it though (even for 10.3). Update: Of course, grub doesn’t work with this config. Grub is yet-another open source project that seems to have the “we must throw everything away, recode from scratch, and oh, leave things half finished” disease. When open source is good, it is really good. When it is not, well, … Considering how important boot loaders are, one would think that … maybe … just maybe … they are worth spending time on making work with the newer partitioning schema. Heck, we have terabyte sized disks today. GPT is likely to become the norm. But this is what we see. Words fail me. The maintainers of Grub want GPT to be a v2.0 feature. But grub 2 ain’t ready for prime time yet. So we are SOL. With Tiburon, the problem is solvable, but I need a server to have Tiburon live on. Possible in this configuration, though I would like to avoid setting that up for this particular system.