Dmac Blog

Early this morning I needed a drive out of a freeBSD server at work. I shutdown the box and pulled the drive for some additional storage on a WSUS server. I have never been a big freeBSD fan and today was another one of those moments that futher enforced my feelings. I booted the freeBSD box only to find out that it wouldn’t boot. Keep in mind that this was only a secondary drive. Fedora and Redhat boxes would have noticed the changed and moved on without a hitch. That was not the case for this one so I had to edit the fstab file and do a little hacking in single user mode to get it back on its feet. This was no big deal, but a little frustrating.

About 4:00pm today I was looking into the server room and an evil grin came across my face. I quickly make some FC5 install disks (thanks Heath) and in goes disk 1. I played around with the FC5 install for about 1.5 hours trying to get a desired server config and a good install. At about 8:30pm I had created a LAMP with the following:

Latest MySQL (with ODBC)
Latest Apache
SSL (using same directory as standard http requests)
PHP 5
Python
Perl
Latest PHPmyadmin
VSFTPD (created a webusers group with symlinks to www in home directories)
IPTABLES (with holes punched for 22, 21, 443, 80, 3306)
Imported SQL backup and Home Directory backup from the old Server
Implemented .htaccess restrictions where needed (phpmyadmin etc..)

I went the extra mile to make sure that every install was a registered fedora package. This means that the entire server can be updated automatically via yum or the built in software updater. Patch management will be automatic along with updates to new releases. I am highly impressed with FC5 and it will make a great server. I always give my servers a name that starts with “G”. Ghostwriter and Gargamel have been put down so the new server is Gomer. Not bad for 4.5 hours work!