Story of a miserable server build

[HeroOfPellinor]

So, at this point, I've given up trying to think up solutions and am going to play some TF2 and watch the Olympics closing ceremonies. Here's how it went down.

So I've got this 1U Poweredge 860 I got for cheap on the Dell Outlet a few months ago. I finally got the lease for some colocation space for work signed and want to get this server, which will be one of my "personal use" servers in on Monday. In advance I bought a Promise raid controller and a pair of 150GB Raptors.

So Friday, because I have more servers after this one to setup, I order a USB floppy drive listed by Microsoft as being compatible with the F6 process.....I'm going to be installing a mix of Linux and Microsoft so I figured this would be a good option. I have it sent two-day but hope the do some of the transport over the weekend and it gets here early. Again, I'm not really in a rush but I'm working from home Monday and Tuesday and want to spend that time at the colocation getting things installed so I can start on the config for the firewall and get testing things. I get home late from a side project and go to download the DVD ISO for CentOS. It's a torrent, so I install bittorrent and download it and burn it to disk and call it a night.

Saturday, I install the two Raptors and the raid card. I spend about 10 minutes digging through the office looking for an SATA cable long enough to follow the route Dell has for the cabling to reach the further drive from the controller. Finally find one. I plug everything into the server and it boots up. Sweet. The first thing I do is go to the raid utility and setup the raid. It goes splendidly. I put the CentOS DVD in and it sees it and starts loading anaconda to walk me through the install.

This being my first attempt with linux I'm starting to develop warm fuzzies for how smoothly and quickly this is going. I didn't even need to hit F6 and go through all that BS to install the raid controller driv..............um..........wait. Great, so it's not detecting the raid array and sees no hard drives. Warm fuzzies fading. No problem, done this in Windows a hundred times. Download the latest driver form the Promise website. A tar file. Ugh. Okay let me download and install WinRAR and untar this thing. My streamlined home PC is beginning to accumulate these little stupid apps and I'm getting annoyed. Ah, fantastic, just has an .img file and rawwrite to copy the drivers to a floppy. Why would I freaking have a floppy drive in a computer I built in 2008? Anyway, we had things to go to, so the rest of the day is full. So today.

I go back to the boxes and find an old floppy drive. Open my computer case and the floppy connector is buried under my super long 8800GT and pinned under a few cables. Zero chance of reaching it. So I go get the old Dell XPS T450 from 1998 that still has a floppy drive. Start it up......blue screen before the OS can load. Awesome.....that drive must be toast. So I dig further into the closet and drag out an old HTPC I built out of next to free parts but never utilized because we got satellite. Hook up the old floppy drive to it......and it sees nothing. Need to go into the BIOS and enable the floppy on A.

So I restart the HTPC, DL the drivers again, download WinRAR again, untar it, and create a damn floppy disk with the Linux raid drivers. I crack open the Poweredge 860. Yup, no floppy connector. Let's go to Plan R. I bet Linux is smart enough to let me snag the drivers off a DVD. So I'll just copy them from the floppy to the DVD. Nope. Can't see the diskette which now has Linux files on my Windows PC or the img file is corrupt.

Fine, screw this, I'm going to put a third hard drive into one of those unused SATA port, since I'm connecting to the controller, and load the os onto that and get the driver installed, then install a second time on the raid array and then unhook the drive. Might work, might not. But, damn it, I'm going to get this thing ready to go. Crack open the Poweredge again.......spot the SATA connector...........scan for a free power cable....................fail.

Let me just check on that USB floppy if that gets here tomorrow I can salvage Tuesday. Check tracking and it arrived at a destination about 100 miles from where I live yesterday. Sweet. And was then sent to Memphis. Scheduled for delivery Tuesday.

 

[Twista]

Cliffs?

 

[Crusty]

mount -o loop /path/to/floppy.img /mnt/floppy

 

[George P Burdell]

Originally posted by: Twista
Cliffs?

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: Crusty
mount -o loop /path/to/floppy.img /mnt/floppy

If that's true, thanks.

What is path/to for the DVD drive? I assme there's no relative mapping to D: or anything. I'm guesing it's one of those hds/dv0 things.

 

[Raduque]

Originally posted by: George P Burdell

Originally posted by: Twista
Cliffs?

Cliffs: Lern 2 read!

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: HeroOfPellinor

Originally posted by: Crusty
mount -o loop /path/to/floppy.img /mnt/floppy

If that's true, thanks.

What is path/to for the DVD drive? I assme there's no relative mapping to D: or anything. I'm guesing it's one of those hds/dv0 things.

no, linux doesnt use drive letters at all. s

a dvd should be /media/cdrom once you insert a disc

also, 6-p rule: prior planning prevents piss poor performance

edit: in fact, if you keep playing with cent feel free to hit the *nix forum, theres a few cent users in there

 

[MegaVovaN]

Cliffs:
-op got server
-op proceed to install linux
-linux needs drivers
-op cant find working floppy
-op cant load the drivers from floppy

Conclusion: Classical Linux newb story

 

[Raduque]

Originally posted by: xSauronx

also, 6-p rule: prior planning prevents piss poor performance

I always thought it was the 7 Ps

Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

 

[MisterJackson]

Why don't you just slip stream the needed drivers into your OS disc?

Oh, and WRONG FORUM! Nice trying to disguise it as a story with no plea for help too.

 

[Goosemaster]

"This being my first attempt with linux I'm starting to develop warm fuzzies for how smoothly and quickly this is going. "

/thread

 

[child of wonder]

No offense, but it sounds like you should have done a bit more research before assuming you could just throw CentOS on that RAID array. It sounds like that Promise card is just a fake RAID card so no OS will recognize it sans drivers.

Get a real RAID card and you'll be fine or have CentOS set up software RAID using mdadm.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: child of wonder
No offense, but it sounds like you should have done a bit more research before assuming you could just throw CentOS on that RAID array. It sounds like that Promise card is just a fake RAID card so no OS will recognize it sans drivers.

Get a real RAID card and you'll be fine or have CentOS set up software RAID using mdadm.

To beating them when they are down :beer:

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: MisterJackson
Why don't you just slip stream the needed drivers into your OS disc?

Oh, and WRONG FORUM! Nice trying to disguise it as a story with no plea for help too.

That's what you'd do with a Windows build. In this case I did some looking into the dd command and found that you can grab a driver right off the web with linux dd=http://yourserver.com/name.img. Slick.

Anyway, this story was more about trying to get cute with a 1U Dell server than it was installing Linux which I knew I was throwing myself into the fire concerning.