Well, it’s time for me to do my annual Linux install attempt. Well, I don’t know if it’s actually annual since the month varies quite a bit.
Last year’s attempt didn’t go very far. I made the major mistake of trying to put Linux on my desktop PC. It worked okay enough to run VMWare so that I could run my XP machine to connect to work. But, working with KDE or even Gnome on a regular basis was frustrating. X-Windows just doesn’t handle multiple monitors anywhere near as good as MS Windows does.
So, this time I’m going to focus on the servers. They don’t need graphical interfaces, or at least if they have one, it will not need to do much. And there is no way in hell I’m giving up Windows 7 on my workstation!
I’ll keep updating this blog entry over the weekend as things progress. Worst case, I may be back on Windows 2008 R2 on all the boxes (let’s hope not).
My environment
I have four servers which I use for hosting virtual machines and providing other services. I have a great naming scheme for all my machines. The servers are A, B, C, and D. My workstation is E 🙂 Nice simple names that are very easy to type for file shares (\\a\c$). And, the letter also matches their IP address (a=1, b=2, etc).
Machines a, c, and d are all quad core Intel or AMD boxes with 8GB of memory. B is an older dual core AMD with only 4GB of memory.
I decided to upgrade the drives and rebuild the operating systems on machines A, B, and D. The current drives are a little small and keep running out of space with the image files so I picked up three new 1TB drives. So, the question becomes again: which OS? I thought I’d try Linux again for them since all they have to do is run VMWare server among a few other things that Linux is better for anyway.
The plan
Machine A is the first to get the upgrade. I need to start somewhere and then move all my virtual machines over to it while I work on B and D. Machine A is going to get a new TB drive in addition to the one it already has. I like lots of space, and room enough to backup files across the drives.
In addition to VMWare though, I’m also going to be adding all my other Linux services that I have running in a VM right now. This includes Subversion, Communigate, Apache with this WordPress blog, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. After that, I want to install the development version of Oracle 11g since I’ll be needing to work with that a little at the office. My open source project (Shadow Systems Manager) may also include Oracle support later on.
Machine B will end up running a few smaller VM’s that don’t need much horsepower. B doesn’t have the AMD virtualization extensions in the processor so it can’t handle a lot of processor intensive machines. It will most likely host my Windows 2008 domain controller and WSUS instance.
Machine C isn’t being touched. It will continue to run Windows 2008 SP1 and will host all my media content and SQL Server 2008 SP1. I may install SharePoint Services later if I want to do some development on that as well. Machine C is actually connected to my TV so I can watch Tv shows and movies on it.
Machine D has an AMD AM3 processor so it is nice and fast. I run most my development Windows servers as virtual machines on that.
Linux Distro
The distribution of choice this time will be CentOS 5.4. I probably much prefer Gentoo, but I really have to learn and understand a Redhat based system again. All the monitoring tools we use at work expect RedHat or SUSE based Linux boxes.
Time to get started!
Update: Friday Night 10:00pm
Well, first big SCREWUP. CentOS 5.4 boots from the CDROM only to stop and say it can’t find the driver for the CDROM. Gives me a list of obscure choices and won’t go any further. Can’t even get to a command line to see what dmesg logged during startup. Kubuntu found it with no problems!
Update: Friday 10:23pm
Well, Kubuntu found the CDROM as /dev/sr0 which is a SCSI generic device. God knows why CentOS couldn’t do it. So, I’m burning myself a Ubuntu server disk now. I guess I’m going to have to go with Ubuntu as my OS and I can run CentOS in a virtual machine when needed. I checked and there are how-to documents on installing Oracle server on Ubuntu and I know VMWare can be run on it too.
You know, I have NEVER gotten CentOS to ever install on physical hardware before! I even tried a couple years back on Dell 2650 servers and it wouldn’t boot there either. Given that CentOS is just a rebuild of RedHat Enterprise, who can ever get this crap working?
Update: Saturday 1:00am
Well, Ubuntu installed with no problems at all. Took me a bit a of learning to figure out how to get SSH up and running. Then I formatted the drives and installed VMWare Server 2.0.2. I’m just copying images over now and will get some sleep. Once all the VM’s are copied over from D, then I can start replacing the drives in it and to the Ubuntu install.
Tomorrow I will get Communigate moved over followed by my WordPress and Subversion setups.
Update: Saturday 2:20pm
Well, things are progressing. I’m working on it again and have been installing the tools needed for WordPress. Luckily, I could just copy all my source and configuration from the virtual guest where they were running before. Though, I have to figure out how to backup and restore a MySQL database.
Tip: Always to a “make distclean” before running configure again. I had some problems with 32 bit objects in a new 64 bit world.
Update: Saturday 4:23pm
I now have successfully moved MySQL, Apache, PHP, Subversion, and WordPress over to the new box. I can shut down the virtual machine they’ve been running in these last 6 months.
Next step, CommuniGate for my email. After that, I can start on the second machine.
Update: Saturday 6:32pm
CommuniGate is now moved and running on the Linux box thanks to this article. I can shut down both B and D now 🙂 Well, maybe after dinner!
Update: Saturday 11:40pm
Machines B and D are now running Ubuntu and VMWare is installed and working on both! 🙂
Speaking of VMWare, I love that software! I have 4 guests running on host “A” now consuming a total of 5GB of RAM and I don’t see any performance issue with any of the guests! Linux can definitely host Windows VM’s better than Windows can.
Update: Sunday morning
I just realized this morning that I forgot to copy one of my virtual machines before reformatting the drives it was on. Bummer. Good thing it wasn’t an important one.
Dang. Also, now that it is all setup and configured, I just figured out some better mount point names to use. Oh well.
Update: Tuesday
Things are still running great with no problems. I may start moving some of the virtual machines to the other boxes now to split up the load. Not that the current load on the first server is even a problem yet.