 | | | enterprise 3 install/upgrade question | enterprise 3 install/upgrade question 2006-05-11 - By Rick Stevens
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On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 11:08 +0100, Tony Canning wrote:
> I have been asked to maintain and support a Dell Poweredge 2550 running
> Redhat Enterprise 3. It is a file server with 2 main applications,
> journyx & phplist. The IT staff who set it up are no longer with our
> company and there is virtually no documentation. The rest of our
> network is a mixture of solaris and W2K.
Enterprise 3 is pretty long in the tooth. Current release is Enterprise
4.3. Is journyx the timesheet/project management thingie? And IIRC,
phplist is a CRM or mailing list application.
> My problem is that it appears to be a very minimal install, with no
> GUIs, applications, browser, tools etc. I would like to get something
> like KDE running and also install all the tools and packages and updates
> to make it easy to manage. My immediate goal is to make journyx
> accessible to a new W2K+3 Active Directory system.
You'll need Samba installed to join an ADS domain. As far as KDE and
such, you really don't need that for a server. You can install it, but
it's a bit much simply for management. 99% of what you need to do can
be done via command line.
Check your current disk usage (as root, run "df -h") to make sure you
have space (primarily on the "/usr" filesystem) to add more stuff. If
you have the room, I'd suggest you install Webmin
(http://www.webmin.com/). It's a web-based Linux management system and
makes remote management of the system a lot easier.
Note that webmin won't help you manage Samba, however (there's too many
options for Webmin to do it). However, if all you want to do is make
the Linux box join a Windows domain, that I and others on the list can
help you with. I have a number of Samba servers in a W2k3 domain.
> I have the original installation package (9 CDs) but if I boot from the
> CD I don't see any option to add packages, and the process aborts when
> it attempts to create a new root partition. I cannot risk changing any
> system or application files because I have no way or restoring the
> current setup at the moment.
No, booting from the CD won't let you add packages...it'll ask you if
you want to upgrade an existing system or reinstall the current one.
It can't create a new root partition because all of the disk is probably
committed to existing partitions. If you simply want to add more
packages, the command line tool to use is (strangely enough!) called
"redhat-config-packages". Run that as the root user. Once you've added
the packages, don't forget to do an update...the stuff on the CDs is
really old. Check with Red Hat about your entitlement status for
updates. My guess is that it's expired.
I'd also suggest upgrading the OS. As I said, RHEL3 is pretty old now,
but upgrading does take some skill and entails risk. RHEL4 update 3 is
the current release. A free alternative is CentOS4.3 (built from the
same source code as RHEL, but free). Note that no support comes with
CentOS...you have to use their support forums or find others on the net
willing to assist.
Should you decide to upgrade, make SURE you back up your data and
applications. If you're not sure how they all work, you'd best get a
Linux nerd to help. I'd take a stab at it, but I'm in California and
busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest at the present
time.
> any advice gratefully appreciated
Those are some ideas. What do you think?
-- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- --
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer rstevens@(protected) -
- VitalStream, Inc. http://www.vitalstream.com -
- -
- Memory is the second thing to go, but I can't remember the first! -
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