It’s been a mixed bag on the datacentre project, this weekend.<\/p>\n
I feel that I’m about half a dozen steps further forward, and have only taken one or two steps back.<\/p>\n
But it has been a weekend of problems.<\/p>\n
The biggest obstacle to making progress actually\u00a0took me a while to realise exactly what the problem was.<\/p>\n
I had downloaded CentOS 7, as this was to be my operating system and virtualisation agent of choice for the hosting servers.<\/p>\n
I’d set aside Saturday as the main day of installation.<\/p>\n
I inserted the DVD media containing CentOS 7, and booted up the first server.<\/p>\n
The system went through its normal start-up\/boot sequences, and I took this opportunity to set the iLO2 config.<\/p>\n
Then I set the system language, keyboard language, timezone and country settings.<\/p>\n
And then the OS wouldn’t let me go any further because it said I had no storage space.<\/p>\n
Except the server had half a terabyte of storage, live and flashing a green light at me.<\/p>\n
I ran through the boot cycle five times, and each time the OS said I had no storage, and the flashing green light continued to contradict.<\/p>\n
I stepped through the server boot sequence, and sure enough the array controller said there was plenty of storage space.<\/p>\n
So I did a google, and you know what?<\/p>\n
It turns out that CentOS 7 has a compatibility problem with the HP DL360\/G5 array controller.<\/p>\n
So I downloaded CentOS 6, and burned that to DVD as an iso.<\/p>\n
Some hours later I put the CentOS 6 media in the server DVD drive and booted up.<\/p>\n
Success!<\/p>\n
After the installation, I ran the yum update command except it wouldn’t run.<\/p>\n
I tried several commands for online activity and none of them worked.<\/p>\n
A bit more googling told me that by default CentOS 6.5\u00a0produces\u00a0a closed server – unlike CentOS 7, which is the product I’ve been doing all my reading on.<\/p>\n
CentOS 6.5\u00a0needs to have the eth0 and eth1 ports opened by the root administrator.<\/p>\n
I did this, and then ran yum update, and downloaded and installed 79Mb of update packages.<\/p>\n
I rebooted the system and then successfully pinged a FQDN or two.<\/p>\n
Then I shutdown the server\u00a0and called it a day.<\/p>\n
I had intended to get as far as enabling remote access via SSH, but I haven’t even got in to Firewall rules and Securitisation.<\/p>\n
And I know that’s another solid half-day of effort.<\/p>\n
I’m guessing another 10 hours to bring just the first server in the cluster, to where I want it.<\/p>\n
So that’s next weekend then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s been a mixed bag on the datacentre project, this weekend. I feel that I’m about half a dozen steps further forward, and have only taken one or two steps back. But it has been a weekend of problems. The biggest obstacle to making progress actually\u00a0took me a while to \u2026 Continue reading