Chapter 1 - Prepare for Red Hat Hands-on Certifications (Installation from iso image)

This is my first installation, notes or what I inpout is at the bottom of each page, I built out a VM using the iso image I had for RHEL6, and with 512 MB memory, and 20 GB Disk space :

The proceed to boot, and do the installation :

Starting ...

Oops ...WTF ? RHEL6 doesn't work well with Itanium procs ? ...

...or actually I just need to enable "Virtualization Technology" for Intel procs, and or "AMD V" for AMD procs ...

http://hereirestinremorse.wordpress.com/virtualbox/this-kernel-requires-an-x86-64-cpu-but-only-detected-an-i686-cpu-unable-to-boot-please-use-a-kernel-appropriate-for-your-cpu/

Made that change to my laptop BIOS ...

Now fire it up again and resume the installation ...

I opted to skip the 'Media Testing', you have to tab thru the 'textual gui' for rhel...I got the error message, 'you do not have enough RAM to use the graphical installer'....hmmm...I like the pretty GUI windoze...so I am gonna kill it, add more RAM to my VM, and start over :)

Reset my RAM to 1024 MB of memory, and restarted, pretty GUI installer working , yaay !!!

I will spare you the boring details of the 'typical installation screens' for rhel where mostly one accepts the defaults, setting language, keyboard, and timezone are so exicting I almost wet my pants :)

I chose " Basic Storage Devices" for the storage options, and clicked "Yes, Overwrite any existing data" b'boz I know I have nothing on that partition :

Might as well go ahead and configure the IP Address information to a static IP Address that I want to use for my server (named 'rhce01')

You can of course get all of your IP configuration information from a DOS prompt with command 'ipconfig /all' :

If my IP information is wrong, we can always change this later after the fact :

Clicking next are more default screens, including 'setting root password', I set mine, and then proceeded until I reached this screen for 'type of installation' , following my book, I selected 'create custom layout' and proceeded :

I selected the 20 GB disk partition I setup for this VM :

Have to create the partitions (did the book forget this step ?? )  :



I layed out my partition table like this :

After 2 final warnings about formatting your disk and erasing all data, the disk druid program goes to work creating my partitions scheme

Done. Now onto the bootloader configuration screen ...

I selected 'Virtual host' configuration for this VM, I will install other types of servers and mess with them later :

After selecting 3 desktop package groups, and one group from the applications (browser) I continued the installation and got an error ' You do not have enough space to install the selected packages' ....Really ? Wth ? This should NOT have happened as far as I can see ? The minimal filesystem requirements are here for RHEL6 : http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/rhel6/rhel_6_installation/rhel_6_installation_s2-diskpartrecommend-x86.html 

Had to go back and delete the VM, and restart from scratch, not a big deal, choose 30 GB for my VM this time, and made sure I followed the min spec for the default disk layout of RHEL, per my book I added in 2 physical volumes (2 GB each) , an LVM group which contained those physical volumes, and a Logical Volume which was made up of both physical volumes (total of 4 GB) and mounted under /home .

On the bootloader screen, I accepted defaults to install boot loader on "/dev/sda" , did not opt to set a boot loader password, and continued :

waited a little longer, and rewarded with the following screen indicating a successful installation, yaay !!

Initial install complete, now it looks lie we are in the 'Post Installation Phase' :

Follow the remaining setup, connect to RHN at this time if you already have an account (I tried, I have an account, network issues ! ...Doh ! Fix later, and connect ) I did create a user for myself besides the 'root' account named 'rhill' , Here is my RHEL6 server VM finally installed and working with GNOME desktop  :



I logged in and of course had to change the default terminal screen colors to black and green (just like tghe 'matrix'...lol)

So I take a look at my network interface, it's not showing the static IP address I configured it to work with ? hmmm....took at look at my "/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0" and the ONBOOT="no" ...reset to yes, and "service network restart" and now the the IP is showing, so I might have missed a button or switch in the rhel installer ...

Now that I have the system TCP IP configuration up and running, I want to next configure to connect to the RHN network with my existing account :

After I enter my RHN credentials, and select my package channel (limited vs. all updates) I reach another screen with my hostname for creating the profile :

Error registering on the RHN, but I know that my account credentials are good, and I have good internet connectivity, the error messages in the terminal running in my background will provide a clue or the answer for the failure to register I hope :

Ok, looking further, now I have a clue ...

Well, tis time to get putty up and running from my laptop host :

There, we go, by default, root is not allowed to ssh into linux, if we want that later (probably a bad idea for security) we would have to make changes th the "/etc/sshd/sshd_config" file to 'permit' root access, and restart the sshd daemon :

So there is another way to login to RHN, your userid within your profile (different from your email address), I tried that, and discovered that all of my RHN subscriptions arfe 'exhausted'...whoops ! Will contact our redhat TAM monday morning :

In the mean time should be no big deal for me to pull more pakcages from the ISO I have for RHEL6, moving onward and forward now

I wrote a breif QA script to give me all of the details of a system I want to look at, at a glance, here is my RHEL6 VM thus far :

[rhill@rhce01 ~]$ ./qa-basic1.1.sh
QA Server Basic system checklist
-----------------------------------------------------
0.) Hostname (uname -n) set to:    rhce01
-----------------------------------------------------
1.) Hostname (/etc/hosts) config file:

-----------------------------------------------------
2.) Network (/etc/sysconfig/network) config file:
NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=rhce01
GATEWAY=192.168.0.1
-----------------------------------------------------
3.) DNS (/etc/resolv.conf) config file:
# Generated by NetworkManager
search ad.savvis.net
nameserver 24.217.0.5
nameserver 24.217.201.67
nameserver 24.247.15.53
-----------------------------------------------------
4.) Net Interface (/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0) config file:
DEVICE="eth0"
NM_CONTROLLED="yes"
ONBOOT="yes"
TYPE=Ethernet
BOOTPROTO=none
IPADDR=192.168.0.10
PREFIX=24
GATEWAY=192.168.0.1
DNS1=24.217.0.5
DNS2=24.217.201.67
DNS3=24.247.15.53
DOMAIN=ad.savvis.net
DEFROUTE=yes
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=yes
IPV6INIT=no
NAME="System eth0"
UUID=5fb06bd0-0bb0-7ffb-45f1-d6edd65f3e03
HWADDR=00:0C:29:33:DD:39
-----------------------------------------------------
5.) Redhat Release (/etc/redhat-release) config file:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.1 (Santiago)
-----------------------------------------------------
6.) Routing Table(route -n)
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
192.168.0.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     1      0        0 eth0
192.168.122.0   0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 virbr0
0.0.0.0         192.168.0.1     0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0
-----------------------------------------------------
7.) NTP (/etc/ntp.conf) config file:
# For more information about this file, see the man pages
# ntp.conf(5), ntp_acc(5), ntp_auth(5), ntp_clock(5), ntp_misc(5), ntp_mon(5).

driftfile /var/lib/ntp/drift

# Permit time synchronization with our time source, but do not
# permit the source to query or modify the service on this system.
restrict default kod nomodify notrap nopeer noquery
restrict -6 default kod nomodify notrap nopeer noquery

# Permit all access over the loopback interface.  This could
# be tightened as well, but to do so would effect some of
# the administrative functions.
restrict 127.0.0.1
restrict -6 ::1

# Hosts on local network are less restricted.
#restrict 192.168.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0 nomodify notrap

# Use public servers from the pool.ntp.org project.
# Please consider joining the pool (http://www.pool.ntp.org/join.html).
server 0.rhel.pool.ntp.org
server 1.rhel.pool.ntp.org
server 2.rhel.pool.ntp.org

#broadcast 192.168.1.255 autokey        # broadcast server
#broadcastclient                        # broadcast client
#broadcast 224.0.1.1 autokey            # multicast server
#multicastclient 224.0.1.1              # multicast client
#manycastserver 239.255.254.254         # manycast server
#manycastclient 239.255.254.254 autokey # manycast client

# Undisciplined Local Clock. This is a fake driver intended for backup
# and when no outside source of synchronized time is available.
#server 127.127.1.0     # local clock
#fudge  127.127.1.0 stratum 10

# Enable public key cryptography.
#crypto

includefile /etc/ntp/crypto/pw

# Key file containing the keys and key identifiers used when operating
# with symmetric key cryptography.
keys /etc/ntp/keys

# Specify the key identifiers which are trusted.
#trustedkey 4 8 42

# Specify the key identifier to use with the ntpdc utility.
#requestkey 8

# Specify the key identifier to use with the ntpq utility.
#controlkey 8

# Enable writing of statistics records.
#statistics clockstats cryptostats loopstats peerstats
-----------------------------------------------------
8.) NTP Step-tickers (/etc/ntp/step-tickers) config file:
# List of servers used for initial synchronization.
[rhill@rhce01 ~]$

Lastly, I just need to mount the ISO image, and get a default apache http and ftp server setup, this should be 'cake' ... :)

I wasn't fast enough (or something) to cpature the screen shot, but before, we do anything, we need to Connect the DVD/CD ROM device drive to that ISO that we booted from. This is NOT done from within linux, you need to do this from VMware (the terminal) first, check out all of my mount points before this is done :

and now after :