ShiNNinG.net

Okay, first technical post!

Fresh on the heels of the official RedHat release of Enterprise 5, I decided to start my test platform on the newest CentOS release, which is still the RH beta (not knocking the CentOS guys, I thank them deeply for what they do).

Download the iso’s and burn them, check.
Grab some free hardware, check.
Create hardware RAID, check.
Run the installer, err… wait, what? no drives?

Okay, ran into this issue before with an I20 based RAID cards and CentOS. I can’t grab the drivers from Adaptec, they are way too old and the installer would just bitch about them. I know they must be included with the distro, but are not loaded, or another driver is loaded by default for that chipset.

So, I ran the installer with the linux noprobe command. Now I can select the I20_block driver, but nothing else was recognized, gotta find that that PS2 keyboard, now were is it….. Okay got it,

I20_block driver, check.

Man it’s a real pain to setup custom partitions with just a keyboard in the GUI installer, next time I must remember to run in text mode, or at least see if I can load the USB drivers. So, pretty much nothing else hardware wise was found, hence the noprobe worked. Hopefully everything else will be discovered on the reboot.

It was, set the NIC parameters, set the firewall options to only allow SSH, configure SELinux to permissive (I am not running any services except for SSH at the moment, it’s okay). The Gnome interface is behaving a bit quirky and not opening certain system-config-x screens. Doesn’t matter, gonna be running from the command line anyway. Set inittab to boot to runlevel 3 and reboot.

As a side note. The install required 5 of the 6 cd’s!. To install the base, X w/ Gnome, Programming Tools, and the System Tools. And the CD that was skipped was number 4! I know this is not a CentOS issue but a RedHat one, and I know, I could do an NFS install and not have to swap CD’s, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. This has actually been talked about in the Fedora forums for a bit, FC is already 6 CD’s and the Extra’s alone come on a DVD. And I think there is talk of merging Extras into the main FC release. Oh, that should be fun.