Smooth Sailing with CentOS

My brand new server arrived in the office 2 weeks ago, along with my new hard drives, 4 1.5TB disks, ready to go into a RAID 10 configuration. I had a few problems getting CentOS installed onto the box, the PERC H200 controller needed to have it's firmware updated, which meant having to install windows 2003 just to run the utilities, (because someone at the dell factory... forgot!)

It didn't take long to install windows, (I have acronis enterprise edition, took about 15 minutes) and update the firmware, and install CentOS. So far so good!

I install CentOS with no extra packages, and try and be as bare bones as possible, just as a general rule.

I run a combination of windows and linux desktops for personal use in and around the office, and I use SSH across all platforms. One windows, I use a client called Tunnilier, it's fast and has support for port forwarding, x-11 forwarding, using keys for SSH login, sftp built in, it's pretty neat. I would advise all linux fanatics who find themselves having to live on windows, to get this client!

As I do with all new installs of CentOS,

yum install -y && reboot

A bit risky, I know, but if it breaks now before it enters testing, then I find that much better, than breaking in production. All the packages update, and I install my favorite combo for virtualisation and managing that virtualisation

yum install xen virt-manager xauth -y

I would not generally advise people to use the -y switch when it comes to installing stuff, unless your very sure you know what packages are coming your way. Basically, for me, I've done this install a good few times, but every sys admin should take their own advice!

These are my my first blog posts, so if they are not complete, or if I should edit them, feel free to comment.

Day One!

Not sure what to call this, so I called it Day One. It's not really day one, been in this position for a long time, but it's day one for this blog.

Currently, I have a whole bunch of servers up and running doing the following:

3 Domain Controllers, 2 DNS servers , 3 Exchange Servers, a PPTP Server, a File Server, an Application Server and a Terminal Server.

These guys are all currently hosted over a mixture of five virtualisation servers, running either XEN, on Centos, or VMware ESX Servers.

While this is a pretty sweet setup - I've decided to 'rotate' my servers. During the installation and setup of this site, it was pretty adhoc. Applications installed and removed, systems configured with more resources than needed. I want to clean up the domain, to make it as efficient as possible.

I've got hold of a new machine - Which will serve as the starting point to allow me install my 'perfect' network. This is just my opinion, and I would welcome input along the way. (If anyone reads this!)

So, my first decision -

What will be the base for my new server?

I pick Centos, so that I can use xen to host the new machines of the domain. Reason? I've been using it for years, and I know it, and I can get it up and running pretty quickly. Feel free to comment if you feel otherwise :)

Well, I got to get cracking, so I'll see you on the other side.