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Debian Network Installation

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Installing Debian Over the Network

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.

Word Press for BlackBerry

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.

Automated System Administration

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:

  1. Rebuild the automatic system administration infrastructure I once had.
  2. Document the thing here so I will not have to do it again from scratch (and maybe get inputs from the more geekified public).
  3. Learn how to operate this wordpress thing in the process.

The software and tools I tend to deploy are:

  1. Debian GNU/Linux
  2. FAI
  3. puppet
  4. to a lesser extend cfengine, mainly because it is a dependency of FAI.
  5. git

I will write more later as I progress on this little adventure.

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