JMComputer's Blog

New Server Install November 11, 2009

Okay, so my first post.

Set up a server today as one of my projects, hardware’s a little on the aged side, and somewhat smaller than I would like for a production server, but beggers cannot be chosers, right?

Specs:

2 Ghz Celeron, 768M mem, 40G ATA-33, 2x 18G SCSI, everything else integrated on motherboard.

So I had the debate over which distro to install since there’s not much money for software.  So debated between Ubuntu or CentOS, ended up with Ubuntu, so then time for Desktop or Server install. Both good options, but the “client” would like to have a desktop environment for some administration. So it came down to the Desktop CD. The standard install went through without a problem, even got most of the services installed (apache, Dovecot, postfix, etc). Now here’s where the fun begins, I have been searching for an Open Source CRM, and had checked out quite a few (SugarCRM, and a couple others), found vTiger CRM, contacted clients and asked them to see the demo. Come to find out they really liked it, so that’s on the plan to install later. Now what to do with those SCSI drives…

Since I’m installing a CRM and IMAP mail server, I decided to make the SCSI drives a RAID1 (mirroring). So I started researching this so that I was at least somewhat prepared as to what packages to install and steps to take and the like. Found a nice walkthrough (wish I hadn’t deleted the link already) that talked about setting up software RAIDs using mdadm. Followed it through generally, although on the first run somehow I ended up with the /dev/md0 missing the superblock (or was it just /dev/sdb1?), so it took me another hour or so attempting to delete the /dev/md0 and then the partition tables on the drives. Eventually I did get the RAID assembled and running, got the /home directory copied over, so later I’ll copy again and mount it as the /home directory.

Also interesting, if the Ubuntu devs ever read this, I used the User and Groups administration tool to create some users and change root’s password, oddly enough the users were created but none of the passwords worked, I actually had to use the terminal to change the passwords (yeah, I know, lazy using the GUI, but was trying to do that at the same time I was mucking with the package installs, RAID setup, etc).

TODO: finish configuring apache, sshd, imap, contact the company handling the network and have the network configured for the server. Then I can finally pull down the pages from GoDaddy and hand out the usernames/passwords.