So, we needed a new little rack mount servers for work. We generally use Dell, we only needed a single CPU and RAID1 so a Poweredge 750 looked like it would do the job. Now normally I’d use Gentoo for the OS but since this box has to run Lyris Listmanager which won’t support you unless your running Red Hat (I know, its stupid but they are right bastards about it) I ordered a copy of Red Hat ES3 with the PE750. Since I kinda like being able to remotely reboot and monitor boxes a DRAC card looked like a plan also. 28 days later the macine arrived.
Its a sweet little 1U package. Really basic rails though, but as nothing is hot swap it doesn’t matter. Alarm bells started to ring though, when I booted without a mouse and it complained… moving along I filled in the boxes as requested and the box came “up”… well, it did kinda. You see, I configured eth0 (in Anaconda) to be the real IP and eth1 to be the 10.X network, the gateway is on the real IP network. For whatever reason the eth1 configuration wipes out eth0’s default route, making the internet non-visible… *sigh*.
With that fixed I thought I’d set up up2date since paying Dell means I get an RHN login etc. I followed the instructions to the letter but it wouldn’t work, complaining I was not authorized. I pondered, I poked… nothing worked. I went for a coffee, came back and it did! Now why don;t RH tell you to just wait whilst their databases all sync up. It would have saves much hair pulling!
So… 800 odd packages installed. Why does Red Hat ES (thats Enterprise Server remember) install KDE, Gnome, sound tools (no sound card…) etc etc. None of this stuff has any place on a server. Easily removed with ‘rpm -e’ I think… well, no. You seem, you need Gnome for up2date to work, from command line! WTF! I really do not understand why I need gnomelibs for a command line tool. Thats dependencies gone mad, I don’t want gnome! So anyway, I got rid of all I could. Up2date worked again… and promptly stuck gnome and esound etc back on ‘cos Anaconda needed updating and it wanted…. *sigh*
Okay, so by now I’m starting to hate RedHat. This is not surpising since I have been brought up on Slackware. But hey, its all working now. Lets install Dells OpenManage tools since I’d like to be able to monitor the box and remotely reboot when Gnome takes the server out 😉 So, pop in the Open Manmage CD and run the installer. Hmmm… it no like my DRAC III/XT, apparently its unsupported in Liunx. Odd, Dell sold it all bundled. I called Dell, Dell pondered. Dell said they call me back… 2 hours later it transpires that the DRAC III/XT is “unsupported in Linux” and I could get my money back if I wanted. Prats. No matter. I pulled ‘racadm’ and ‘racadm.1.so’ from the RPMs and poked teh DRAC card manually, opening up telnet and setting baud rates. I can telnet in and reboot now, so thats one thing I guess. But isn’t all this just supposed to “work” these days?
Right, all done, surely! Lets install Lyris. Hmmm… /home is 2GB, thats small. Where is all the disk space? Oh, there is 47GB of unpartitioned disk. Odd. Hmm, docs say its LVM and will grow to fill. Yeah right. Its not LVM at all. Out comes the Gentoo System Rescue CD. QTParted won’t move the ext3 partitions so I can grow /home (which is /dev/sda2 BTW). I try ‘parted’ manually but that complains that my ext2 partitions don’t look normal and thus it won’t move them. Back on the phone to Dell i get through to teh same engineer as with teh DRAC card. He doesn’t know whats what, he says its not right, he says I should reinstall. Arse.
So right now I’m installing via Dell’s Open Manage installer which I just know is going to f*ck up and do it all wrong again. Tomorrow I think its time for a fresh install direct from RedHat CDs.
Why can’t Dell and RedHat just get their act together! I won’t be buying a Dell/RH combo again.
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