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What a day...   
08:17pm 11/08/2007
 
mood: aggravated
music: I predict a riot
I'm not sure if I've been having a bad day or not. Nothing particularly awful has happened but things haven't exactly gone smoothly. After getting up late, milling about in the garden enjoying the lovely weather and generally doing nothing much and talking to various people's parents that had popped round for one reason or another I finally decided that as everyone was out doing something or other that I should get round to installing the Dell PowerEdge 2550 machines that we bought a while ago. I want to put CentOS 5 on this particular one and use it as a host for a couple of Xen virtual machines but haven't been having much luck.
First off I boot it up to check how the RAID controller is configured... except that there's isn't a RAID controller apparently. After a lot of fiddling and googleing and a phone call to Matthew I was still non the wiser so I swapped the RAID key with one from another PowerEdge that is known to work. No difference. How about the 128MB RAM fro the RAID controller? Nope, still doesn't want to show up in the BIOS. More fiddling later after booting it up without the RAID key which seemed to force it to revert to before the RAID key was installed and I am finally able to enable RAID in the BIOS, now, on with the install... or not.
Now I can't find my CentOS 5 DVD, just the empty case. After turning the house and the office over from top to bottom I still can't find the damn thing and start to contemplate how I can possibly get round this without a working machine equipped with a DVD burner when it hits me, my nice shinny new 17" MacBook Pro has a DVD burner in it! A not so short while later and I have a replacement CentOS DVD so I should be ready for the install now, right?
Wrong! I boot up the PowerEdge with the DVD in the drive and it tries to boot off the hard drive. Hmmm, that's odd, try it again. Same result. A quick trip in to the BIOS reveals that it is set to boot off the CD drive and that's the problem, it's a CD drive, not a DVD drive! Damn. Now I can either download and burn 6 (yes six!) CDs or switch to plan F.
A quick consultation of the Red Hat documentation reveals that I can use a boot CD to install from FTP, no problem, I've done this before with SuSE. A bit of FTPing between my laptop and a CentOS 4 machine and a lot of swearing later and I have a 7MB boot ISO ready to burn. Things are finally looking up. Mount the DVD on the laptop and check that it is being exported by OS X's built in FTP server, yep. Now I can finally start the install. After almost erasing a hard drive that I need the data off the install is now in progress and it's not making bad progress. Lets hope nothing else goes wrong, I've still got to move another machine in to a rack case and install a second boot drive in it for software RAID 1, I wonder how many ways that will find to break...		  
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Sorry, all private now   
01:19pm 01/07/2007
 
mood: contemplative
All old posts have been made private (friends only). Not sure if I will ever update this again. Otherwise, I can be found on deviantART and Facebook		  
     
 
 
z_eight_a
 
 

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