Install Debian

This section is obsolete.

We use Debian GNU.

Here are the installation notes to help you:

  1. Find Debian stable image (whichever is 'stable' at time of installation -- this documentation is written for Squeeze)
  2. Prepare a USB stick to boot from (can do it manually or with convenient tool called "unetbootin")
  3. In system BIOS, choose 'Auto-power on on power restore' (if there is such option), and see if you can make USB stick to not be the first disk (when it's the first disk, it gets assigned device name /dev/sda and makes the installation a tiny bit harder)
  4. See which network card is in the server, if it requires non-free firmware, the package needs to be manually copied from Debian's non-free repository onto the install media (example is package "firmware-bnx2" for Broadcom NetXtremeII cards (http://packages.debian.org/sid/all/firmware-bnx2/download)). Once package is on the media, the install procedure will, if it is needed, automatically find and install it

  5. For timezone, use timezone where the server is physically located, and answer Yes to "Is the hardware clock set to GMT?"
  6. Choose manual network configuration, specifying the choosen hostname, IP and network details as listed on the IpAddresses page

  7. Partition disks. Most often, this comes town to creating identical partitions on all disks that are part of RAID1, and creating RAID arrays as in the example that follows. Currently, we usually configure: all remaining free space on /, /boot (300M), /var/cache/openafs (set to 5 or more GB), /tmp (1G), and installer suggested amount of swap.

    Example: 2x 160 GB system disks
    
    System disk 1:
    
    sda1: primary, beginning, 1 GB, ext3, /boot
    sda2: primary, beginning, 8 GB, use as phys. volume for RAID (swap space: 1 GB x number of proc. cores)
    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 (swap, same size as above)
    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 as follows:
    
    md0: swap
    md1: ext3, /
  8. Users & password setup: set root password, and create "root0" with a unique password (the installer forces at least one user account, make sure to delete the account after installation)

  9. If /dev/sda is the USB stick and not the first disk, do not install GRUB to the Master Boot Record of /dev/sda. Instead, answer No at the prompt and choose /dev/sdb as the device. Then, take USB stick out, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to replace references to hd(1,0) with hd(0,0), run update-grub.conf and grub-install /dev/sdb. No other tunings (to /etc/fstab or mdadm.conf) are needed as, if you used the partitioning example, no direct partitions occur in fstab, and for mdadm -- it uses UUIDs instead of partition names anyway.

  10. In tasksel, at the end of installation, select "Standard system utilities" and "OpenSSH server"