gregoa's blog: one more debian box

gregoa's blog
random musings about computers, life, and everything

2006-04-14 01:04:45 +0200

we have an old red hat computer at the office, and I've been thinking about migrating it to Debian for a long time.
today I took another old machine (PII-200, 96 MB RAM, 2x2 GB HD on some adaptec SCSI controller, winbond NIC, IDE CD-ROM) and installed Debian. some notes:

downloaded the sarge net-install iso.
in the meantime I grabbed a keyboard and a monitor, booted and went to the BIOS - oops, no CD-ROM in the boot options (well, the box ist from 1996 ...).
the Debian CD-ROM really didn't boot.
downloaded Debian floppies.
reset. "boot failure".
still no success after re-writing the boot disks; neither with tom's rtbt floppy.
then I found sbm.bin on the Debian CD - a floppy image with a funny boot loader.
yeah, I could boot with the floppy and tell it to use the Debian net-install CD-ROM!
"expert26 $funny_kernel_&_boot_options" - "too many parameters".
"expert26".
I tried LVM for the first time. funny.
no network for apt - huh? well plugging the ethernet cable into the correct socket helped.
writing the boot loader (no grub because of LVM) - installation of lilo threw errors. I continued the installation nevertheless.
reboot. well ... no bootable device.
tried some things. no success.
then - ähemm - I re-enabled booting from hard disk in BIOS; & - it worked. good to know that LVM (from debian-install) & lilo work.
aptitude install less joe ssh
locales, .bash*, ...

now I just have to plan the further steps (replacing the old red hat box, running both, changing the network/masquerading stuff, ..., ?) - but I can do all this from home via ssh ;-) update: one week later the old red hat box died (I guess it was the PSU - at least something smelled not really fresh) - it was really good to already have a Debian box on cold standby :-)
btw: spamassassin (with a well trained bayes db) rocks! — 2006-05-01

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