[Malvern] Micro Server Fedora 4 install

[Steve Cashmore]

Hello all,

Since Geoff expressed an interest I thought I'd let you know how things 
went.

Well I decided to try and install a minimum Fedora onto the micro server 
earlier this week, and decided to do it differently this time from the 
previous ftp installs.  The CPU card  (it was originally a small 
industrial PC) has a header claiming a very early form of USB support 
and I decided to try and get it working.  I made up an adapter to 
connect a USB DVD recorder and tried all the pre-compiled USB drivers I 
had.  Nothing seemed to work so I dug out the chipset data sheets.  The 
chipset was obviously a preliminary version of later work, but had a 
couple of small register differences.  I modified the source and rather 
to my surprise managed to get it working!

The BIOS is much too early to know how to boot from a USB device so I 
needed to find another way to try installing from the DVD.
I loaded up a version of TomsRootBoot floppy with my new USB driver and 
partitioned & formatted the new harddisk and installed the driver.  I 
could now find the DVDrecorder so loop mounted the Fedora boot.iso and 
copied the kernel and initrd files together with the startup scripts to 
a folder on the hard disk.
Next I unpacked and loop mounted the Fedora initrd and added my USB 
driver before repacking.
Then I inserted my standard GRUB boot floppy, rebooted, and entered the 
boot time command line.  I typed the locations of the Fedora boot files 
and told it to boot.  Up came Fedora into a standard install mode and it 
found my USB DVD drive.  I chose a minimum install and left it to do its 
work.

Most things worked after a reboot and I just needed to manually add my 
USB driver to get a working DVD drive.  Fedora didn't find and configure 
the two NICs, but they're standard old 3c509s so it was just a question 
of loading the driver and invoking the configure script.
It's been an interesting exercise but I may have to rethink things.  The 
problem is the amount of memory (actually 64Mb not 32 as I first 
reported).  I can't add any more, have trimmed every service I don't 
need but am already into swap.  That's without adding the Cyrus IMAP, 
Apache and IPSEC servers.  I'll build a custom kernel to see if that 
helps, but currently it looks as if the jump to a 2.6 kernel may be a 
step too far.  The old 2.4 kernel system used 58Mb with everything I 
need installed and running.

Firing up Yum is an extremely painful slow exercise so I no longer 
bother.  Just calling rpm is much quicker for simple package management 
if not actually easier.

I fell foul of the increased security (SELinux component and new to me) 
and took some time before I could telnet in.  I often use telnet from a 
piece of industrial equipment that can't do ssh.  The error message was 
misleading and initially I thought the problem was the client and not 
the server.  Both  Selinux and the default firewall were blocking telnet 
but there was no info in the logs.  Also the BIND and DHCPD servers 
complained on starting and panicked.  I needed to adjust the config 
files to account for some new functionality.  Samba wouldn't run either 
until I replaced my config file with the default (almost empty) one. 
Removing it and reinstalling Samba seemed to fix it though, even with my 
own config file.  I suspect the problem started during a Yum update.

So there we are - a partial success.  I always enjoyed trying to get a 
quart out of a pint pot!
-- 
Steve