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Ubuntu Server on HP ProLiant DL360

Wed 21-Jan-2009 in english, geek | 4 comments

I have teared enough hairs from my skull to make a rug trying to install Ubuntu Server 8.10 on a HP ProLiant DL360 server. The short answer is it will not work and the quick solution is install Ubuntu Server 8.04.1-LTS instead.

The longer answer is that has to do with the disks. The DL360 (and supposedly its sibling servers) use a RAID that Ubuntu 8.10 does not understand. It doesn’t matter if i tell it to enable or disable SATA RAID, or to use or not use LVM. The system installs nicely but after that, it just won’t boot. Same goes with both the x64 and x86 versions of Ubuntu Server 8.10. Since the RAID is enabled in hardware, i am supposing that my disks are mirrorred and that i’m protected on that plane. The 8.10 setting probably just allowed me to actually see that we have a RAID going on. Transparency is always nice.

I’ve read incoherent (at least to me) explanations that you should go and poke with Grub to get things right, but i couldn’t get a comprehensive enough explanation that i would know exactly what i was doing. So i decided not to be bothered. And then i read in another article that thou shalst screw the latest version and just go with the previous one, and things are nice and fine. You should even be able to update to the latest version over the command line, so you’ll get virtual machine support and all the other goodies the 8.10 provides.

There are two implications. One: install 8.04 and you’re up and running before your coffee gets cold (even in a well ventilated server room), or two: if you know exactly how to actually get 8.10 up and running with the RAID discovered, please tell me in the comments. Thank you.

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A failed hardy to intrepid update

Sat 1-Nov-2008 in english, geek | Please leave a comment!

My main laptop’s Linux is b0rken. I broke it by dist-upgrading from Kubuntu 8.04 “hardy” to 8.10 “intrepid” using the recommended methods… ignoring that the recommendation also is to wait a few days until the stressed-out developers release the x.x.1 patch.

So now i’m sitting here with

  • no network, on either wired or wireless sides
  • no graphics, since the proprietary nvidia driver was removed from my apt sources
  • no installation disc, since i never burned the image on the external HD to CD (the update was strictly over-the-net though, without using the downloaded installation image)
  • no fun

I can probably get back into graphical mode if i can find a backup of a non-nvidia configuration file. Still, i ain’t laughing. Linux isn’t desktop-ready with this release. Grump. At least i have my secondary laptop so i can complain in public.

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VMware I&C day 2

Tue 27-May-2008 in english | Please leave a comment!

Most of today for me went waiting for actually installing a virtual machine and nodding out while the story was about managing storage and the infrastructure. In perspective, infrastructure management is rather neat, and storage systems aren’t exactly my turf. At least not yet. I mean, i kind of get the gist of it, i just don’t get the kicks.

Basically, there are three technologies to care about when it comes to non-local storage: Fibre Channel storage area networks (SAN), iSCSI and file servers, more fashionably referred to as network attached storage (NAS).

A SAN is an abstract blob of storage to which your VM server connects to and read through whatever file system is appropriate. The SAN is big, powerful and expensive and has a bunch of disks. If you need more capacity (or performance), you just throw more disks at it. In a Real Installation, you connect to your SAN over the Fibre channel stuff i wrote about yesterday.

A NAS is a dedicated file server and you access the files using the file server’s file system. At least that made sense when i was told about it, except that i may very well have an ext3 disk system share over CIFS and NFS and while Windows doesn’t understand ext3 natively (Vista currently doesn’t understand ext3 at all), it sees the NAS as a networked disk share… and in fact, i do have one.. uh, two :)

An iSCSI setup basically is a SAN, or a NAS, with the expensive bits traded for Ethernet technology. And while it wasn’t told on the course, you can have Fibre channel over IP if you think native FC is too expensive (as well as IP over Fibre Channel if you’re truly bizarre), and ATA over Ethernet if you think SCSI over Internet is overkill (and routes too much)

On the infrastructure management side, there’s this application called Virtual Center, through which you administer all your VM servers and the VM licensing. You can order your virtual machines, storages and other paraphernalia in units not quite unlike OUs in Active Directory, and it all makes managing your infrastructure a rather efficient deal. And install we did. But before we did, i did experience another few duhs and setbacks. I wrote yesterday that VMware ESX doesn’t give a carp about USB devices. Today i learned that VMware ESX also doesn’t care for IDE disks, which renders the rather nifty Ubuntu JeOS image useless, even if it’s pimped for VMware use. It’s not just made for ESX.

Before the show ended today, i had installed one Windows Server 2003 (image size nearly 800 MB), an NT4 server (image size about 80 megs :) and a Ubuntu 8.04 Server, which now is running SETI@Home just to see whether i can put some load on the VM rig.

Tomorrow, we’ll be handling templates and that’s when the power administrator bits start.

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Cacti on Kubuntu 7.10

Fri 4-Apr-2008 in Timor-Leste, english, geek, suomeksi | Anna palautetta!

A cactusCacti is a free network monitoring and graphing (“trending”) tool, which i’ve managed to install on a computer at work. The idea is that eventually i will have a portable network monitoring tool that is both easy to physically lug around and reasonably easy to plug into a new network and let it do its thing. Eventually, there will be more tools installed. While the solution presented here is really simple, i did four complete re-installs of the system before i was up and running. I could have made it with less work if i’d either followed the kind instructions given, or if i’d spent more time debugging. This time i just took the lazier path. These are the steps i took:

  • Install Kubuntu 7.10 (which is the current stable version — the new one’s out in twenty odd days). While any Linux installation will do, these instructions are for a Debian-based distribution… which includes the aptitude application. If you don’t have aptitude, just use whatever package management system may you have. When you’re done, reboot.
  • Optional, but recommended: Using Adept, or any other package management tool of your choice (use apt-get, if everything else fails), remove the packages you don’t need. I removed the office and multimedia packages, since this won’t be a desktop/office station.
  • Optional: Add proprietary display driver, in my case, the NVidia driver. REBOOT once you’re done, or start from step one above.

Now it’s time to update your system. I first did this using the graphical Adept tool, but it crashed on me, so i moved to the command line instead.

  • Fire up a terminal (i use konsole) and enter sudo aptitude update. You will be prompted for your password. Watch the texts fly.
  • Next, enter the following two lines:
    sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
    sudo dpkg –configure -a
    Repeat until you get no errors

Your computer is now updated. Time to add Cacti. Cacti needs MySQL to be installed first, and while the cacti package suggests that it will install MySQL properly, it won’t. At least not yet. A future version probably will. Again at the terminal (konsole), enter the following and answer Yes to any questions.

  • sudo aptitude install mysql-server
  • sudo aptitude install cacti

The installers will ask for the passwords for mysql administration and the cacti application. Depending on the context, you will create one or recall it. In either case, write that password down, because once you need it, you won’t remember it :)

The Cacti installation will use the Apache 2 web server, but i had a problem with the Cacti installation that needed to be (located, debugged and) fixed first:

Edit the /etc/apache2/conf.d/cacti.conf file. On the first line of the file, change the Alias /cacti into Alias /cacti/site. Leave the path at the end of the line untouched.

I know i’m probably doing something fundamentally wrong here, as Cacti should be running from the aliased directory /cacti, not /cacti/site, but applying this fix made Cacti run for me.

Now fire up a web browser on your monitoring box and go to http://localhost/cacti/site to access your Cacti installation. If all goes well, log in as admin/admin, change your password and (with the help of the Cacti manual) start adding devices!

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Xubuntu on a thumb

Sat 22-Sep-2007 in english, geek | Please leave a comment!

As a small exercise in geekdom (when i probably should have been to bed already) i installed Xubuntu 6.10 on a one gig Kingston Mini-Migo USB flash drive. Yeah, it’s pretty small :) . Instructions are here.

What i didn’t get running straight out of the box was the wireless network, which was handled with a small sudo ifdown eth0 and sudo ifup eth1 from a terminal session. Even the 1920 x 1200 screen (or whatever this is) worked without having to do anything about it. Also, since the installer i used was for Ubuntu, not Xubuntu, some graphical bits seem out of place — like stuff not starting from the menu.

Still, this was more a proof of concept for me, whether this could be done in reasonable time and with reasonable effort. And it could.

Now to bed.

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Edgy Eft is out

Thu 26-Oct-2006 in english, geek | Please leave a comment!

Kubuntu 6.10 “Edgy Eft” has been released! Whee! Christmas comes twice this week :)

Now the question remains whether i should do an apt-get --dist-upgrade on my fully operational Linux, try out Virtual PC, install Xubuntu 6.10 on my really oldish home PC, or all of the above.

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Installing Linux on a single-partition NTFS disk

Tue 12-Sep-2006 in english, geek | Please leave a comment!

It should be noted that i’m an OS agnostic. I believe the right OS, and the right platform, for any job depends on what job needs to be done and by whom it needs to be done. Thus, at home, at my spare time, and whenever i write on my thesis, my platform of choice is Linux and i would not dare to have my mother use anything else than Mac OSX (and there is no such thing as a command line or anything complicated on OSX, alright?)

My new job is a Windows shop. It makes total sense is a business environment; MS makes software that can be integrated in really spiffy ways (something KDE eventually will catch up with ;) . However, i’d still like to have a laptop that can dual boot into Linux at times. But what to do, my bright and shiny work tool comes with a single, fully populated 100 GB partition (plus a “hidden” service partition, but that’s another story). How can i install Linux when there is no space for it — without re-installing Windows, or paying for a Partition Magic license?

Easily.

The tool for the job is called gparted, short for Gnome partition editor. Gparted can do a lot of fun things, and one of them is to safely resize an NTFS partition (despite what you might have heard about Linux being unable to reliably write to NTFS). And here comes the spiffy part. Gparted can install as a “live” Linux distribution, on a USB flash memory thingy.

Here’s how. Install gparted LiveUSB on a USB memory stick. Boot your Windows box from it. Select the Windows partition, click the “resize” button, make space for a Linux distro (i gave it 20G of the 100G disc). Let gparted do its magic. Reboot Windows (this will run MS chkdsk). Install Linux. Whoa.

Installing Kubuntu on my rather piffy laptop took less than ten minutes, including booting from the installation/live CD and doing some eye candy customization. Kubuntu did most of the configuration, like that goofy display. The only things i really needed to tell it was where i am, what keyboard layout i have (when is that going to be automated?), my username & password and the name of the laptop. That’s it.

Man i love an easy OS.

Two more things i just might install, and both are file systems: 1. sshfs to mount a directory over ssh for painless backups of thesis and equally painless access to my music files (another idea: rsync.net at US$1.80/GB/mo). 2. flickrfs to manage my flickr photos just like they were in a local directory. Unsane.

Update: Oddly enough, flickrfs worked the first time i tried it and sshfs did not. Instructions said i should log out (to acivvate group settings used for fusermount). After logging in again, sshfs works wonders and flickrfs has stopped working. Oh well.

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MP3 on Kubuntu

Tue 1-Aug-2006 in english, geek | 2 comments

My Windows and Mac colleagues will sneer at me, but i finally have MP3 support on my Linux box, that runs Kubuntu 6.06. The Ubuntu Wiki suggests enabling the multiverse repository and installing libxine-extracodecs but that didn’t help me since i couldn’t find the libxine-extracodecs listed at all.

In the end, i googled for libxine-extracodecs and found the right page, downloaded the deb package and ran sudo dpkg --install libxine-extracodecs_1.1.1+ubuntu1-2_i386.deb. Et voilá, after restarting amaroK, i can play stuff like this :)

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Top and bottom one

Wed 17-May-2006 in english, geek | Please leave a comment!

What i like: Having a fresh copy of Kubuntu 6.06 F7 installed on my computer, complete with my home directory rsync’ed from my previous installation. And it just works.

Actually, the installation just didn’t work as expected (though i was told that it would if i dowloaded the Nightly build of 6.06 instead — some Unicode bug, eventually). My workaround was to install the current Kubuntu 5.10 (which will be un-current in about a month), replace all occurrences of breeezy with dapper in /etc/apt/sources.list, then do an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. Still it was a quick and painless experience. At least compared to this:

What i don’t like: The after-pains of today’s root canal therapy, even after 2*600 of ibuprofein and 2*500 of paracetamol.

It should be noted that the actual root canal therapy was remarkably painless. And coming from a guy like me who hates pain, that says a lot.

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Re-install and resume

Tue 4-Apr-2006 in english, geek | Please leave a comment!

I’ve re-installed my home Linux installation again. I seem to be the master in configuring it to pieces. These days, however, i don’t worry, and i even take a backup copy before i do things that may be a bit too drastic for survival.

At home i use the SimplyMEPIS Linux because it’s a Debian derivative, it’s dead easy to install, and it has nvidia drivers built into the distro. The other day, i thought it was about time to upgrade my Mepis. I edited the apt sources according to the Mepis-lovers’ blog, did an apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade (and an apt-get –fix-broken dist-upgrade) and kaboom, nothing worked. Well, okay, i still had the commandline and all my data, but it wasn’t really what i could consider a useful setup.

In goes the Mepis installation disk i burned a year ago. Foop, everything is back. Mepis would even preserve the /home partition, so my personal data would have been safe even if i hadn’t backed up before upgrading. Wow. However, the old Mepis i had on CD also had old Firewire drivers (i suppose), so whenever i wanted to retrieve a file from my external hard drive, over ssh from my Windows laptop, my home box froze.

Did the dist-upgrade thing again but it broke my system. Fetched a new fresh ISO copy of Mepis from mepis.org, instaled (yeah, it preserved my /home again) and -foop- everything works like it should. KDE even remembers my desktop settings. I feel so at home. And as extra spice, my external hard drive now appears at the desktop using its name, helmer (after John Helmer. My internal hard disk is labelled hogarth), and there’s a fish tank from Sherman’s Lagoon on the taskbar — which gives me an oddly DNA-esque feeling :)

The story doesn’t end here though. The next Mepis distribution will be built on the Ubuntu base. Ubuntu Linux is a very nice Linux distribution with a very nice philosophy. Or more geekly put, it’s a Debian Linux that works. I use kubuntu (Ubuntu on KDE) on my Linux laptop. And i love it. But (k)ubuntu doesn’t include some non-free stuff like an mp3 decoder or the proprietary nvidia driver with hardware OpenGL acceleration, so i don’t want to use it on my home box. But i suspect these will continue to be built into Mepis. So it’s happy happy joy joy to the new marriage!

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