2007 — Day 80 - busy Monday morning

According to the Official Ubuntu Book15 and its section on appropriate choice of kernel for the server, "You almost certainly don't want to run the Big Iron kernel:"

If you can count the number of processors in your server on your fingers ... If you ordered your server online by typing a "1" in a "Quantity" box ... If turning on the server doesn't require a manual and doesn't dim the lights in the entire building ... don't use this kernel.

Benjamin Mako Hill (et many al)

So that's sorted out which kernel not to use then, despite Brack labelling my choice of PC a "supercomputer in my basement" — if only. Next topic: RAID. I specified RAID 1 in hardware, and it seems you can also do the same in software. Question is, do you hafta? Do ya? Do ya? (Are you feeling lucky, punk?) The (unbig) iron(y) is, of course, that the damn box hasn't even turned up yet!

Cups runneth over department

It's here! And, you know what? Having spent the day "researching" till my brain cell Hertz, I'm still sorely tempted just to bang Ubuntu's LAMP Server straight on it and gosh-darn the torpedoes. Or maybe go for the desktop installation first (familiarity and all that) and poke it around a bit to see what I'm contending with while having a GUI desktop at my fingertips rather than being left in (frankly) unfamiliar command line territory. But I want the server to have as little clutter as possible and, after all, I do now have the leisure to experiment.

(Decisions)2! (That's an exponent, by the way, not yet another footnote callout...) OK, let's go!

You call that progress?

I burned the requisite AMD64 ISO image of the 6.10 server system, error checked it, installed using it, worked through several options, decided against a manual partition edit (big mistake) and now (therefore) belatedly realise I have cocked up my RAID array setup. So, after shutting the box down safely (Thanks, Brian!) without a GUI:

sudo shutdown -h now

which is, itself, evidence of successful installation of a server system, I shall resume tomorrow. Definitely time (11:20, when did that happen?) for a well-earned cuppa. And if anyone tells you programmers know how to write good, or even effective, doc index entries, or installation-time help, laugh in as lofty a fashion as you can manage.

22 January 2007  

Footnote

15  To my mild alarm, this is the only title of the four Ubuntu-specific books I have that even contains more than a paragraph or two on Ubuntu Server itself.