1. Report

All tasks done, left to do:

1. Insert disks 2x 1 TB WD disks (waiting in our cabinet) into Dell server (missing drive brackets)
2. Recable the whole thing? (too many too dense wires at the back)

2. Photos

http://hcoop.net/~rkd/hcoop/imgs-2010-01-05/

3. Software installation

• With USB stick (Debian stable/lenny AMD64)

• Have non-free Debian package "firmware-bnx2" on the USB stick to recognize the network card in the server (http://packages.debian.org/sid/all/firmware-bnx2/download)

• Manual network configuration

• Hostname: winner from member poll https://members.hcoop.net/portal/poll?id=31. (Note: when asked for the hostname, type just the hostname without domain name)

• IP Address: 69.90.123.75

• Partitioning:

  Server will have the following disks configuration:
  
  2x 160 GB (system disks, should be in the server already)
  2x 1 TB (AFS disks, delivered separately, need to be placed in disk brackets)
  
  Only system disks need to be partitioned initially, as follows:
  
  System disk 1:
  
  sda1: primary, beginning, 1 GB, ext3, /boot
  sda2: primary, beginning, 8 GB, use as phys. volume for RAID
  sda3: primary, beginning, all available space, use as phys. volume for RAID
  
  System disk 2:
  
  sdb1: primary, beginning, 1 GB, ext3, unmounted
  sdb2: primary, beginning, 8 GB, use as phys. volume for RAID
  sdb3: primary, beginning, all available space, use as phys. volume for RAID
  
  Then, after RAID partitions have been assigned, new option "Configure RAID"
  will appear at the top of the partitioning menu. We add the two devices in
  RAID 1 mode:
  
  md0: sda2 and sdb2
  md1: sda3 and sdb3
  
  Then, they appear in the partitions list and are configured:
  
  md0: swap
  md1: ext3, /

It'd be nice if you can make the mdX numbers match with partition numbers (i.e. to have md2 which consists of sda2/sdb2, and md3 which consists of sda3/sdb3), but IIRC the installer does not allow you to choose the numbers so they'll be named md0 and md1. That's alright.

Also, as seen, /boot partition is not on RAID. This is intentional as /boot on RAID is problematic. But sda1 (/boot) will be synced onto sdb1 (by cping the files and running grub-install on it) periodically via cron, so that sdb1 can be used for booting too, in case sda fails.

After the server boots into the installation, we do this:

dpkg-reconfigure debconf  # (choose 'Readline' and 'low')

apt-get install openssh-server  # (if asked, allow login as root)

And that's it.

3.1. Questions

• Does the Dell server come with 6 drawers for disks (where disks can be inserted), or it comes with placeholders only and we need to get the drawers?
• Any way to hook up the new server to our KVM/IPKVM? Do we have enough ports or a way to do this? (I believe yes, because IPKVM has 4 channels and IIRC at least one currently has no signal, meaning it is free?)
• What to do with Krunk? We'd like to get rid of it, but as the network port tends to timeout and shut down from time to time, we can't say it's a reliable system. Do we want to put it up on Ebay or Craigslist anyway, or we just give it to any of our members who wants to pick it up and/or pay for delivery?