Grrr! Chickens and eggs...
So I got a windfall, a donated server (Dell Poweredge) that should in theory make a better router to control our bandwidth problems with people running P2P crap on their laptops over the library network. The donor is always extremely careful about erasing hard disks, so it arrived with the disks blanked and the RAID array controller reset. Fine, I didn't want Windows Server 2003 anyway, and that's surely what was on there.
The problem? This is one of those inch-high rack mounted servers. It has three SCSI hard drives and a floppy. No CD. It does have USB ports. So how to get Linux into it? Well, I thought, it should just boot from a USB flash drive or USB attached CD drive. That would be too easy, of course. The BIOS has no options for booting from USB, though it supposedly has "BIOS support" for USB turned on. Dell's "documentation" is not helpful at all, since it assumes that you are going to run the pre-installed OS.
I've dealt with this in the past on machines that were not able to boot from a CD by using SmartBootManager on a floppy, and telling it to boot the CD. Works like a charm. Unfortunately, SmartBootManager doesn't seem to understand USB either. I want to install Debian 4, and web searching finds various vague instructions in poorly written English that purport to tell how to boot from a floppy in order to the load a kernel and ramdisk from USB. The idea is to get the network installation version of Debian loaded, and then it will install to the HD by transferring packages from the Debian archives over the internet. That part is easy once you get it loaded. Unfortunately, I can't see any way to get these boot floppies to do anything with the USB either, despite the fact that they claim to be capable.
The remaining choice seems to be PXE, which involves booting from another machine over the network, using TFTP. And that would be easy, except that it requires that the boot address be passed in through DHCP, and of course that means not only setting up the boot server but setting up the DHCP server properly. The DHCP server for the staff network runs on Windows and is ugly to mess with. It may not even have the options needed. That leaves the private network used by the transient laptop users who cause this whole mess. That has a DHCP server that runs on Linux, and it can easily be instructed to pass the right parameters. But, it means I have to get the new server temporarily connected to that network, which is a VLAN with a limited number of ports. Gah! I wonder if this is even worth the trouble.
Then comes the question of where to permanently place the server. I was told it was rack-mounted and we have a rack with space and power. However, it wants a four post rack and ours is only two. That won't work. It will fit on a shelf in the server cabinet that houses tower servers, though. But wait, the cooling fans in this thing sound like a jet engine starting up. It would be better off in the mechanical room where the rack lives, rather than in the server cabinet that is right in the staff work area.
TGIF. I'm gonna go home and not think about this for a while. Maybe the answer will fall out of the sky or something. (Fat chance.)
The problem? This is one of those inch-high rack mounted servers. It has three SCSI hard drives and a floppy. No CD. It does have USB ports. So how to get Linux into it? Well, I thought, it should just boot from a USB flash drive or USB attached CD drive. That would be too easy, of course. The BIOS has no options for booting from USB, though it supposedly has "BIOS support" for USB turned on. Dell's "documentation" is not helpful at all, since it assumes that you are going to run the pre-installed OS.
I've dealt with this in the past on machines that were not able to boot from a CD by using SmartBootManager on a floppy, and telling it to boot the CD. Works like a charm. Unfortunately, SmartBootManager doesn't seem to understand USB either. I want to install Debian 4, and web searching finds various vague instructions in poorly written English that purport to tell how to boot from a floppy in order to the load a kernel and ramdisk from USB. The idea is to get the network installation version of Debian loaded, and then it will install to the HD by transferring packages from the Debian archives over the internet. That part is easy once you get it loaded. Unfortunately, I can't see any way to get these boot floppies to do anything with the USB either, despite the fact that they claim to be capable.
The remaining choice seems to be PXE, which involves booting from another machine over the network, using TFTP. And that would be easy, except that it requires that the boot address be passed in through DHCP, and of course that means not only setting up the boot server but setting up the DHCP server properly. The DHCP server for the staff network runs on Windows and is ugly to mess with. It may not even have the options needed. That leaves the private network used by the transient laptop users who cause this whole mess. That has a DHCP server that runs on Linux, and it can easily be instructed to pass the right parameters. But, it means I have to get the new server temporarily connected to that network, which is a VLAN with a limited number of ports. Gah! I wonder if this is even worth the trouble.
Then comes the question of where to permanently place the server. I was told it was rack-mounted and we have a rack with space and power. However, it wants a four post rack and ours is only two. That won't work. It will fit on a shelf in the server cabinet that houses tower servers, though. But wait, the cooling fans in this thing sound like a jet engine starting up. It would be better off in the mechanical room where the rack lives, rather than in the server cabinet that is right in the staff work area.
TGIF. I'm gonna go home and not think about this for a while. Maybe the answer will fall out of the sky or something. (Fat chance.)