Well, it seems that one of my older servers has decided to take a dive. It was an Intel P3 @ 1.0ghz and it just died. I used it to run my network monitoring system, in this case Nagios. The system was at the end of it's life and I decided not to fix it and just upgrade it.

 So a quick run to Fry and for 280$ I picked up a Gigabyte Motherboard, 4 gigs of ram, an AMD X2 7750, 500gig Hard Drive and a case and power supply.  Now this is easily 10x what the old system was and Nagios really does not need all that power so it looks like a good time to install Fedora Core 10 and Xen and see how it works.

 Ill note here that I already have a system set up with Xen, one of the Virtual Servers is used for this website. So this is not my first time to run Xen.

 To kick it off I downloaded the latest Fedora Core 10 DVD and installed it on the system. Making sure to customize the install and select virtualization.

For those that do not know Xen is a Hypervisor. A Hypervisor is a virtualization architecture consisting of a thin software layer that runs directly on the hardware intercepting some, or all, operating system calls to hardware. Typically the hypervisor virtualizes CPU and memory while a single privileged guest is assigned to manage and virtualize network and disk.

This is my first time to install Fedora Core 10, I have been using 7 for a while. I must say, the Fedora Team gets a big thumbs up from me on the install. The new graphics are great and the install is smooth and easy. It is amazing how far RedHat has come looking back on my RedHat 4.5 days.

So lets do a quick run through of the DVD install of Fedora Core 10

 Through these first 4 images I just clicked next and took the default. It should be noted that I selected English and not German, that was an accidental click when I was snapping the screen shot.

Here it seems that FC 10 realized that the Hard drive was new and had no data on it. It was making sure that I wanted to set the drive up. 

 On these next three I entered the needed data, In this case Hostname, A root Password and the correct Time Zone.

 OK, A little Grump here, if you look at the US map of time zones there is almost nothing to select in the us for the Central Time Zone. To RedHat and the Fedora Team, come on. Of the 10 largest cities in the US Huston Tx rates #4, San Antonio Tx #7, and Dallas Tx is #9. I am in Dallas so can you add at least one of them to the selection?

Now, with this being a New system with a new drive, I told it to use the whole drive. It gave me a quick "Are you Sure" popup 

Ahh, Software Selection. The only think I changed here was to move the bottom selection from Customize Later, to Customize now. If you do not do this it will install some base packages and move on. I wanted to make sure that I had the Virtualization packages installed from the start. 

 So I make sure that the Xen Services are selected and start the install. Total it took about 15min to install the whole system.

 During the initial BIOS setup on the new system I noted that the motherboard and processor both support the new AMD-V technology.  This means that the hardware/CPU can be aware of the virtual machines and Xen can communicate with it to save and restore cpu states. This is a simplified description and if you would like to know more about it you can read more HERE

So, we boot the system up and Everything looks good

I am going to take a moment here and say that the first time I installed Linux was in the 90's. Slackware 0.99  Yes that is 0.99 and I switched to running Linux as my only desktop in 1995. I am a linux fan and I know a lot about the OS. So, To stop here I could rant about how easy the install is and how great the OS is, but, I had some problems after this point. We will cover  them now. Fedora and RedHat teams, TAKE NOTE.

It seems that the network did not come up. So I loaded the GUI for the network config and told it to refresh the IP. This is a DHCP setup so it should have been online.  It tool me a bit to figure out why it cold not get an IP address but I noticed a small star in the upper right corner of the desktop. Click on it and come to find out, SELinux is blocking DHCP.

 Now, SELinux is Security-Enhanced Linux and is a feature that provides a variety of security policies, including U.S. Department of Defense style mandatory access controls. It controls security access to the system on a very low level and is a pain to manage. It has it's place, but this is not one of them. To top it off, I know of no GUI for managing SELinux and no easy (ie. GUI) way to turn it off. So, I open a Terminal and make the following changes to the system

 #1) open a terminal

 #2) su to the root account

 #3) vi  /etc/selinux/config

        Change SELINUX=enforcing to SELINUX=disabled
         Save the file and exit

 #4)  on the command line of the terminal type

        echo 0 >/selinux/enforce
 

 I am normally all for good system security and making your system as secure as possible but I have yet to figure out how the policies in selinux work. This is also an internal server with no internet connection so turning it off is not a big deal. I just hope that the Fedora team realizes that it does not need to be so locked down that you can not get an IP via DHCP.

So once this was fixed, I pulled up a web browser and was online and running.

Now, while I have my terminal window open and the internet up. I went ahead and pulled the updates using yum. The command is

yum update

and away it goes

Email (will not be published)

Name

Title

Comment
 remaining characters

Post