Since I need to rebuild my infrastructure almost from scratch, I will document the steps, procedures, etc here. That way if I have to go through this exercise again, it should be easier.
I am going to be working with VirtualBox mainly because it is easier and faster than dealing with physical machines. My instance of VirtualBox is hosted on Windows 7 64 bit running on a AMD Turion 64 x2 Mobile Technology TL-60 2.00GHz with 4G ram.
My firewall, running Debian Lenny is already configured as a DHCP server, DNS name server, and DNS cache. It will also serve I am thinking as tftp server. An NFS server will also be required, but I don’t really want to run NFS on the firewall. I don’t really want to run the other services there either, but I have nowhere else to run them (yet).
Prepare for network boot
For more detail, refer to the Debian manuals here. This was remarkably strait forward. I just untarred netboot.tar.gz into the tftp root directory and setup /etc/dhcpd.conf.
VirtualBox Setup
My virtual machines will be configured thusly (unless otherwise noted):
- Debian 64bit
- 256M base memory
- 10GB virtual disk attached to ide0, sparse file.
- Network Adapter 1: Bridged to wireless card
- Rest pretty much defaults.
Next a server will actually be built and configured.
Posted in: System Administration.
Tagged: Debian · netboot · PXE · VirtualBox
I posted this with Wordpress for BlackBerry. Don’t think I will be doing a lot of new posts with this. But in a pinch it is not bad. I think most of its utility be with comment moderation and such.
Posted in: BlackBerry.
Tagged: BlackBerry · blogging · WordPress
Well it has been since last summer or maybe earlier that most of my systems wanted to fail. I am just now getting around to doing something about it. I understand why my children’s systems and my wife’s system fails quite regularly…. They are probably 8 or 9 years old. Pentium M and Pentium III processors, probably hand-me downs, I don’t remember. Anyway they were nicely equipped with 128M of memory and nice 4G hard drives. I think one had maybe 4 1G drives in a stripe set. Well these sorry things kept failing and I would have to replace them with whatever I could find.
Then my hard drive failed in my file server. Don’t understand that, it was about 4 months out of warranty.
Then a disc in my firewall failed.
I patched all this mess together and have been limping along with mainly my laptop as the main system….
I tried install OpenSolaris last weekend on the file server box. I made two discoveries — OpenSolaris will not install from a usb dvd player, I have no internal dvd players at my disposal.
I then discovered that OpenSolaris will not install over the network, well it says it does, I will have to see what I can hack out on that. I really want to run ZFS on my fileserver.
That is why I need to rebuild my automated system administration infrastructure.
I need this mainly so I can build systems more easily when discs fail. Yeah, I know, I could purchase new discs and newer systems, but where is the fun in that (not to mention lack of available funds for such a thing)?
My goals here are:
- Rebuild the automatic system administration infrastructure I once had.
- Document the thing here so I will not have to do it again from scratch (and maybe get inputs from the more geekified public).
- Learn how to operate this wordpress thing in the process.
The software and tools I tend to deploy are:
- Debian GNU/Linux
- FAI
- puppet
- to a lesser extend cfengine, mainly because it is a dependency of FAI.
- git
I will write more later as I progress on this little adventure.
Posted in: System Administration.
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Posted in: Miscellaneous.
