Operating System

openSUSE 10.3

I started this project with Debian Etch as described below, but ended up switching to openSUSE 10.3 for support of my RAID card. When Debian Lenny become the stable release, I might look at switching back to Debian since I like their command line functionality better. Yast is nice, but sometimes I am not sure exactly what it is doing and it is a bit slower than Debian once you get used to the command line. OpenSUSE 10.3 was my second choice primarily because it used a Linux kernel >2.6.19, and secondly because it was mentioned in most of the RAID hardware literature.

Installing SUSE was easy. I downloaded the DVD ISO image from www.opensuse.org and burned it to a DVD. When I started the installation, the RAID card and drives were installed and a volume had already been created. It was pretty easy during installation to specify that the file structure be mounted on the OS drive with the exception of /home, which was mounted on the RAID array. The menus were all intuitive and easy to understand.

One cautionary point I ran into was that if your RAID array is larger than 2TB you will need to mount it after you have installed the OS. See the section on RAID for details.

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Debian Etch

I chose Linux as an operating system since it is designed for server applications and is Free and free. After some distribution shopping I arrived at Debian. I like Debian because it is extremely stable, well documented and I have been able to find good support since it is widely used. I am currently using the Debian Etch distribution.

Before you install Debian, you need to think about Samba. I know this sounds out of order, but if you have a Windows machine, the only way to make network access seamless is to have common usernames and passwords for the Windows login, the Debian login and the Samba login. For details take a listen to Linux Reality episode 26.

Installing Debian is quick and simple. I simply downloaded the ISO image for the net install version from the Debian server, burned it to a CD, put it in the CD reader and rebooted the computer. My BIOS setting looks for a bootable CD in the CD reader first, so you may need to make that change if yours does not. It will ask some questions about language and time then install the basic packages. It will reboot from the hard drive and then ask you if you want to set up any pre-configured stuff. I selected the basic package and the GUI.

Debian automatically puts the installation CD in the list of places to look for installing packages. This is annoying and completely unnecessary. To get rid of this, you need to edit a file called /etc/apt/sources.list and comment out the line that refers to the CD. The resulting text file will look similar to this
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#
# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official i386 NETINST Binary-1 20070407-11:29]/ etch contrib main

#deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official i386 NETINST Binary-1 20070407-11:29]/ etch contrib main

deb http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian/ etch main
deb-src http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian/ etch main

deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib
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I highly recommend setting the IP static. I have static IP addresses for everything on my network. You can do this through the Desktop|Administration|Network menu in Gnome or you can edit /etc/network/interfaces using your favorite text editor.

Then you will want to update everything that installed from the CD
#apt-get update
#apt-get upgrade

This is a list of "useful packages" I found on the internet. I think it was on howtoforge.net, but I can't remember exactly. I had trouble compiling a program the first time I installed Debian, but after I installed all this I had no trouble.

apt-get install binutils cpp flex gcc libarchive-zip-perl libc6-dev libcompress-zlib-perl libdb4.3-dev libpcre3 libpopt-dev linux-kernel-headers lynx m4 make ncftp nmap openssl perl perl-modules unzip zip zlib1g-dev autoconf automake1.9 libtool bison autotools-dev g++