The old Penguin server has been pulled out of deep storage, I have acquired a very old Viewsonic 14 inch monitor, and they are set up and ready to go at the new secret Datamantic world headquarters. I am now waiting for my Powerbook to burn disc 1 of CentOS 4.1 i386 (that is a specific distribution and flavor of Linux,) so I can load it into the server and begin to configure this thing.
It is exciting and also a little scary. Like walking around in the dark. I really don't know what is going to happen. I've been studying the very active CentOS mailinglist for the last few weeks and there seems to be an awful lot of community support around this distribution. Hopefully that will be enough to get me up and running.
For the record, I am most scared of Bind, followed by email services.
Here goes...
w00t!
Took a little while to figure out how to drop into BIOS and force it to boot off the CD drive rather than the old borked Red Hat install on the hard drive (the googled advice was, literally, "mash all the function keys as you are booting up, and one will drop you into BIOS." LOL. Worked though.)
Note, this is like step -3. I'm not even to the starting line yet. But just seeing the initial CentOS screen made me happy.
Sounds like fun, good luck.
Well, CentOS 4.1 with kernel 2.6.9 is installed and booting. It's good that nothing went wrong, although I'm not exactly sure what could have gone wrong yet. So now I have a working install and the learning begins. The idea is to turn this stock server install (no graphical shells, or office tools, ect...) into the exact system I need. The hope is that this won't be too difficult since the exact system I need is close to what many people need. So there are lots of docs out there.
I need: Apache for webserving, PHP for my web apps, MySQL for the database. Then Bind to take care of DNS, and then some big package (maybe Postfix) for email. Probably I will also try to get something like Webmin running (that is a web based front end for administering the server which would make my life easier.)
First order of business is becoming competent with YUM, which is the CentOS package manager. You use YUM to help with both locating programs and updates you need on the internet, and also with installing them. My sense is that if I can be comfortable with YUM I should be a long way toward where I want to be.
YUM.
Well, that took a little longer than just plugging my powerbook in and getting a connection, but I finally got the test server on line. Damn that feels good.
It wasn't hard. It was just that I had *no* idea what to do when it didn't just work. So start googling. And just keep trying stuff. Finally turned out to be pretty much what I already knew to do if I have any trouble with a broadband connection: unplug the AC so the modem powers down, wait for a minute or two, plug it back in. And then I just had to manually restart the network on the server:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart
So once you find that magic incantation it's easy. At least in this case.
I was stumped for too long because I thought the issue was much more complex than it really was. I'll have to watch out for that tendency.
Anyway, now that I have it on the net I am checking out YUM. Doesn't look too bad. I think the Linux world has gotten a lot more sophisticated since I last tried this around three years ago. So I am cautiously optimistic at this point.
|
It is exciting and also a little scary. Like walking around in the dark. I really don't know what is going to happen. I've been studying the very active CentOS mailinglist for the last few weeks and there seems to be an awful lot of community support around this distribution. Hopefully that will be enough to get me up and running.
For the record, I am most scared of Bind, followed by email services.
Here goes...
- jim 9-07-2005 10:09 pm
w00t!
Took a little while to figure out how to drop into BIOS and force it to boot off the CD drive rather than the old borked Red Hat install on the hard drive (the googled advice was, literally, "mash all the function keys as you are booting up, and one will drop you into BIOS." LOL. Worked though.)
Note, this is like step -3. I'm not even to the starting line yet. But just seeing the initial CentOS screen made me happy.
- jim 9-07-2005 10:47 pm
Sounds like fun, good luck.
- jimlouis 9-07-2005 11:15 pm
Well, CentOS 4.1 with kernel 2.6.9 is installed and booting. It's good that nothing went wrong, although I'm not exactly sure what could have gone wrong yet. So now I have a working install and the learning begins. The idea is to turn this stock server install (no graphical shells, or office tools, ect...) into the exact system I need. The hope is that this won't be too difficult since the exact system I need is close to what many people need. So there are lots of docs out there.
I need: Apache for webserving, PHP for my web apps, MySQL for the database. Then Bind to take care of DNS, and then some big package (maybe Postfix) for email. Probably I will also try to get something like Webmin running (that is a web based front end for administering the server which would make my life easier.)
First order of business is becoming competent with YUM, which is the CentOS package manager. You use YUM to help with both locating programs and updates you need on the internet, and also with installing them. My sense is that if I can be comfortable with YUM I should be a long way toward where I want to be.
YUM.
- jim 9-08-2005 1:49 am
Well, that took a little longer than just plugging my powerbook in and getting a connection, but I finally got the test server on line. Damn that feels good.
It wasn't hard. It was just that I had *no* idea what to do when it didn't just work. So start googling. And just keep trying stuff. Finally turned out to be pretty much what I already knew to do if I have any trouble with a broadband connection: unplug the AC so the modem powers down, wait for a minute or two, plug it back in. And then I just had to manually restart the network on the server:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart
So once you find that magic incantation it's easy. At least in this case.
I was stumped for too long because I thought the issue was much more complex than it really was. I'll have to watch out for that tendency.
Anyway, now that I have it on the net I am checking out YUM. Doesn't look too bad. I think the Linux world has gotten a lot more sophisticated since I last tried this around three years ago. So I am cautiously optimistic at this point.
- jim 9-08-2005 5:35 am