Peter's Blog

I bought another book, the Linux Pocket Guide (ISBN 0596006284). It is an interesting read as it is a summary of the most useful commands and utilities available in a typical linux distribution (the book is aimed at fedora but most of it, apart from the section on upgrading packages, applies to debian and ubuntu as well).

By summary of commands, I mean that it will describe a typical command like 'find' in a reasonable amount of detail and will describe the most useful options. It is not a reference book where you have to struggle to find the salient information: if you want to be bewildered there are always man pages to read. It is written in a clear and informative way: it is less than 200 pages and I skim-read it in an evening.

Things I have learnt from it:

• I use 'dig' but 'host' is a simpler alternative (no having to pick out the answer).
• by using

  set -o vi
  

  you can enable 'vi' editing on the bash command line
• why you need to use 'export' in bash: the variable is defined locally until you export it!

It is a user level guide, there is nothing in there about system configuration, daemons, /etc/init.d etc. I would be tempted to buy other pocket references for that kind of stuff. The book is only £5.56 on amazon.

I have a few problems with my oneandone dedicated server:

• I don't know my way around Fedora Core and cannot find anything
• Plesk seems to hide most of the configuration deep in it's own directories, making finding anything even harder.
• It is Fedora Core 2 which is a year or two old. The packages available are a little long-in-the-tooth (Mysql 3.2, Subversion 1.0.9) and the versions are becoming deprecated. Plesk 7.5.3 only supports Fedora Core 2 so ultimately again Plesk is an annoyance.

So I decided to install debian. Ubuntu, my distribution of choice is derived from debian so I know my way around it. Also there is a complete debian mirror on oneandone's servers that I can access without impact on my bandwidth allocation.

I was inspired by this article about installing debian on a oneandone server which gave me the confidence to give it a try. However I didn't follow these instructions for a few reasons:

1. It requires building a kernel on a running debian system. I don't have one of those and didn't feel like making one. The instructions erroneously say that the network interface has to be built into the kernel but mine is ok as a module.
2. It sets up static ip addresses instead of using dhcp. The oneandone faqs seem very insistant on using dhcp. Getting this going was the most difficult part of this setup but I am glad I have done it this way: my server will not suddenly break if oneandone reconfigure their network.
3. I didn't want to clear out my entire hard disk, I wanted to keep the fedora/plesk system in case I wanted to return to it. The fedora installation allocates 27G to a /home partition. I decided to copy the little of this that is used to the root partition and use the home partition (/dev/hda7) for my new installation. I can always re-use the fedora partitions later, if 27G is not enough for me.

I am still grateful to the author of that article for making me believe it was possible.

These are essentially the steps I took:

Start of logged into the fedora system, copy the old home directory to the root partition:

mkdir /newhome
cp -a /home /newhome
umount /home

If the umount fails because files in /home are open then run

/usr/sbin/lsof | grep home

to see what has the files open and stop or kill the processes (lsof, list open files, damn useful).

Create new file system in partition where /home was:

/sbin/mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda7

Mount the new installation:

mkdir /mnt/new
mount /dev/hda7 /mnt/new

Download debootstrap from debian mirror on oneandone servers. This mirror is only visible to oneandone customers. Untar and try to run

tar xvfz debootstrap-0.3.1.5.tar.gz
cd debootstrap-0.3.1.5
export DEBOOTSTRAP_DIR=`pwd`
./debootstrap --arch i386 sarge /mnt/new http://update.pureserver.info/debian sarge

gives error:
E: no /home/peter/debootstrap-0.3.1.5/devices.tar.gz. cannot create devices

Hum, supposed to be in debootstrap archive from what I can tell. Installed debootstrap under ubuntu and copied the file up.

If you get:

W: Failure trying to run: chroot /mnt/new mount -t proc proc /proc

then log in properly as root to get path set up correctly:

su -l root

rather than

su

Looking good:

I: Base system installed successfully.

Do base configuration. This is essentially the debian setup program, it installs loads of packages, asks you what time zone you are in etc.

chroot /mnt/new
mount /proc
base-config

Mostly obvious stuff but:

• apt sources set to

  deb http://update.pureserver.info/debian unstable main contrib non-free
  

• Install the following
  • Web Server
  • Mail Server
  • SQL database
• Use readline interface for configuring packages: I find the dialog interface invasive, it pops up and stops you seeing anything else on screen which you sometimes need to understand what is going on.

For me the nfs package failed to install so I ran dselect and removed it. Installed openssh server and, most importantly, vim. sshd just works, needs no configuration.

Setup /etc/fstab:

/proc           /proc   proc    defaults                0       0
/dev/hda7       /       ext3    defaults,noatime        0       0
/dev/hda2       none    swap    defaults                0       0

Set up /etc/network/interfaces:

auto lo eth0
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

Use dselect to install Linux kernel image for PPro/Celeron/PII/PIII/P4 machines.

Ensure network card is in /etc/modules (without this we are lost):

via-rhine

My box has via-rhine, you can check in /var/log/messages to see what yours might be and look in /lib/modules/*/kernel/drivers/net to see if there is a module for it.

Install lilo:

apt-get install lilo

Copy /etc/lilo.conf from fedora and modify it:

boot=/dev/hda
# for fedora
#root=/dev/hda1
root=/dev/hda7

install=/boot/boot.b
vga=normal
timeout=10
prompt
lba32

read-only

default=lx
append="console=tty0 panic=30"

#
# Debian install.
#
image=/vmlinuz
    initrd=/initrd.img
    label=lx

Run lilo to set this up:

lilo

Quit out of the chroot and copy the /etc/hosts from fedora to the new install.

exit
cp /etc/hosts /mnt/new/etc/hosts

Now go to oneandone control panel and reboot the system into the recovery system. This will have you box running an emergeny debian install. It's handy because we are installing debian. Once installed, mount your new install so that you can copy some more files to it:

mount /dev/hda7 /mnt
cp /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf /mnt/etc/dhcp3
cp /etc/dhcp3/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/local /mnt/etc/dhcp3/dhclient-exit-hooks
chmod 755 /mnt/etc/dhcp3/dbclient-exit-hooks/local

This last step took me hours to figure out, I think the dhcp3/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/local is the trick as it does not exist in a standard debian install. While I was messing around I managed to reset the execute bits on the files which broke dhcp completely, hence the chmod to make sure.

From the oneandone control panel, reboot server in normal mode and enjoy.

What is so damn cool about linux is that doing something like this is possible at all. Reninstall a different operating system on a pc in a different country (Germany) through a command line terminal? Try doing that in windows.

I've been playing more with my Dedicated Server, getting to grips with Plesk. Plesk is a control panel for people who want to sell hosting packages. It allows you to:

• Create user accounts
• Create domains on those accounts
• Set disk quotas, limits etc
• Setup a list of applications that users can install (although the range supported by Plesk seems a bit limited, fantastico on site5 does better).

Plesk is a bit fiddly to use, go round in circles looking for things, it's buggy and the version I have (7.5.3) apparently only supports an old version of Fedora Code (2). This version of Fedora has an archaic version of MySQL (3.23?), python 2.3 and not a lot else. I've been spoilt by ubuntu's plethora of packages. Apperently Fedora core is called Fedora core because it is the core operating system. However, I don't really want to get into rpm hell, having to find them, find the dependancies, give up, install from source like I used to with SuSE. I like the way ubuntu has packages for everything I can think of.

I'm deciding whether to try upgrading to Fedora Core 4. It would probably kill plesk but do I care? Am I going to sell web hosting? Plesk would make that easy and it is arguably an easy way to administer multiple domains for myself.

My plesk is broken anyway: if I try to look in the 'Application Vault' I get:

ERROR
Up LevelUp Level
Unable to query database: Duplicate entry '28-Package name' for key 1
0: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/class.ActionLog.php:638 psaerror(string "Unable to query database:
Duplicate entry '28-Package name' for key 1")
1: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/class.ActionLog.php:515 logcomponent->submit(integer "28")
2: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/class.ActionLog.php:450 actionlog->submitbuffer_()
3: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/SiteApps/class.SiteAppPackageManager.php:395 actionlog->submit()
4: /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/SiteApps/class.SiteAppPackageManager.php:188 siteapppackagemanager::unregistersiteapppackage(object of type siteapppackage)
5: /usr/local/psa/admin/htdocs/server/site_app_pkgs.php:35 siteapppackagemanager->syncwithdatabase()

I've contacted oneandone's tech support but no reply. My gut feeling is that this one is not a simple thing and I doubt they will be able to help anyway.

I've got myself a dedicated server from one and one. I have had problems with them in the past but they were doing a deal that was too good to miss: £29 a month for 40G/2GHz/256M, Plesk panel, remote reboot and debian recovery tool, free copy of Dreamweaver MX. I ordered it lunch time and it was set up by 4pm. One and One is a big company, there are lots of little 2/3 man companys doing servers but this is the real deal.

One problem I have with it: it's fedora core and I've not used that before, I'm ubuntu/debian. Now where has /etc/init.d gone?

I should have known it would happen, I have to go out tonight, can't play with it. Grrr.