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CentOS 5 newbie install

L

laughingbuddha

Regular Pleskian
Hi,

I'm a Linux/Unix newbie. Played with Red Hat once or twice back in the late 90's but never in a web hosting enviroment.

I'm looking to install CentOS 5 64bit (some users recommend it) on my Dell PowerEdge 3250 server. Brief spec is 2 x 1.4GHZ Intel Itanium2 processors (400Mhz FSB with 4MB L3 Cache), 1GB Memory (256MB x 4), 2 x HP U320 SCSI 15K rpm 72GB HDD's, CD Rom Drive.

1. When installing the OS, to I need to install PHP, MySQL, Apache, FTP (of some kind), and a Firewall or does the Plesk installer do this for me??

2. Can Plesk handle 2 hard drives for storage? Instead of running RAID Mirror I plan to use both drives for storage and run some kind of back up script (no idea yet) to run a nightly back up to an external 2.5" usb hard drive.

Help please of mighty Plesk and Linux guru's


Matt :confused:
 
1. Read the fine manual. (No, you don't need to. Do a minimal install and then use Plesk's autoinstaller to install the rest.)

2. You could do whatever you want with those drives. Span partitions across those drives using LVM or mount the first as / and the second as /var or whatever. Plesk won't care whether your filesystem is on one or two drives. Just know that mail, DB and web files will go under /var, so you'll want plenty of space there.

(I definitely recommend using RAID 1 by the way.)
 
Hi Matt,

I've recently been doing the exact same thing (albeit 32-bit), having previously always used Fedora, so I thought I'd give you a 'how-to' based entirely on my experiences (so it's not neccesarily gospel, but it's worked fine for me):

1. Start the CentOS installer by booting from cd/dvd.

2. For partitioning advice, I used this article and followed it's suggestions to the letter http://kb.swsoft.com/en/819.

3. When prompted by the installer, I deslected all installation types with the exception of the 'Server' option.

4. I entered my appropriate network config when prompted. In my case I specifified a static public IP and corresponding gateway and also a couple of know public dns server addresses, although depending on your needs/set-up, you might want/need to be using DHCP.

5. After the installation has completed and you re-boot, upon first log-in you are presented with a network configuration utility; as I'd set my network up previously I didn't need to do anything with this although there is also a security option which I did alter - by default there is a firewall configured to block most services including HTTP. I chose to switch this off totally at this point as I would be using Plesk to manage the firewall later on.

6. Now I wanted to perform some system updates via Yum, however because CentOS uses bind in a chrooted set-up which doesn't work well with Plesk, I did the following (after a previous attempt without this knowledge caused me big problems with Bind):

- Edit /etc/yum.conf and, under the [main] section, add the line
exclude=bind-chroot

- Next, get rid of the currently installled bind-chroot package
rpm -e bind-chroot

- Now we can use Yum to provide system updates [Please note, if you plan on using ARTs yum packages, which is a really good idea because you get updated Plesk compatible versions of both PHP and MySQL, do not add this channel to yum just yet, otherwise the Plesk installer won't run until they've been removed!!].
#yum check-update
#yum update

7. Now you're system is bang up to date, you can go off and get and then run the Plesk auto-installer. I run this from /usr/local/src but that's just me.
# cd /usr/local/src
# wget http://download1.swsoft.com/Plesk/P...ller_v3.2.0_build070705.20_os_CentOS_5_x86_64
# chmod +x psa_installer_v3.2.0_build070705.20_os_CentOS_5_x86_64
# ./psa_installer_v3.2.0_build070705.20_os_CentOS_5_x86_64

Off we go with the installer. Answer the questions as required and allow the installation to complete.

8. Once Plesk is installed and all appears to be okay, it's then safe, and in my opinion a good idea, to set-up ART's channel in yum and install his updates:

# wget -q -O - http://www.atomicorp.com/installers/atomic.sh | sh
# yum update

For me, at this point it just updated both PHP and MySQL packages and after that, all was good.

I hope this helps you out.

Best Regards,

Simon
 
I've heard people having problems installing Plesk after running 'yum update'. Also Plesk installs a couple of packages that may have updates available. You might want to first install Plesk and then (quickly!) update your system afterwards. This way you know everything is up to date after installing Plesk.
 
Your a star PperfectPenguin, I will follow your guide.

I heard there's a hack to get CentOS 5 running on my Dell PowerEdge 3250. It doesn't support CentOS 5 from that horrible boot menu system it uses, but because CentOS is based on Red Hat Enterprise, you can mod a file to get it to work.

I think I will go with your idea Breun on the YUM, but I will do PerfectPenguin's BIND fix first.

I want to use ART's YUM channel, but there is a subscription fee, and at the moment I don't really have allot of capital to play with.

I'm using 72 GB U320 15k RPM HP hard drives, is this enough to happly run a hosting service. Also I'm using 1 GB of memory, is this ok, or should I look to upgrade this?


Matt Auckland
 
ART's atomic yum channel is free. Only the ASL (Atomic Secured Linux) is a paid for service (and worth paying for).

Note that there is no qmail-scanner package for CentOS 5 yet.

And I installed CentOS 5 (K12LTSP 5EL actually, which is based on CentOS 5) on a Dell PowerEdge recently just fine. I just didn't install nor use those Dell tools.
 
Oh right, I didn't realise about ART's being free. Thanks

Will my spec do the job, the cpus are Intel Titanium2 1.4GHz (Dual Core I think) with 4mb cache, there's two in the server.

What is qmail-scanner and how will that effect me?


Matt
 
Will my spec do the job, the cpus are Intel Titanium2 1.4GHz (Dual Core I think) with 4mb cache, there's two in the server.
Click to expand...

Depends on what the job is. (It's probably an 'Itanium' by the way.)

What is qmail-scanner and how will that effect me?
Click to expand...

It is a package that enables you to use spamassassin and alternative anti-virus products (ART has ClamAV in its repository) with qmail under Plesk. It's what most people come here for I guess. No need to get that Spamassassin license addon for Plesk, unless you want a GUI for your clients that integrates with Plesk's web interface (which is what you're paying for in that case).

If you're not interested in qmail-scanner and/or PHP/MySQL upgrades the atomic yum channel is probably not of much interest to you. Well, there are some other handy packages in there (qmhandle, etc.).
 
Ah. I need spam filtering on the server, I mean most people look for that in a ISP. I know the current ISP who hosts some of my own domains has spam issues. I get all sorts of just through domains with him.

What can I do to use Spamassassin? I use it on my current VPS with WebFusion, so kinda would like it on my own server.


Matt
 
Well, there's two chooses like I said. You can buy an addon license from SWsoft for their psa-spamassassin GUI or if you don't need a GUI in Plesk you can install ART's qmail-scanner and get your filtering going that way. The latter has the added benefit of being able to easily use ClamAV (and other anti-virus products), so you also don't need to get a Dr. Web license (I believe SWsoft is also offering Kaspersky since Plesk 8.2.0). I know I like ClamAV a lot better than Dr. Web. :)
 
Sorry I miss understood you there.

I will go with SWSofts psa-spamassassin GUI as I'm use to that. Can ClamAV be controlled through the Plesk interface?


Matt
 
If you want A/V GUI integration you'll have to go with Dr. Web, or Kaspersky if you're on Plesk 8.2. I don't know about Kaspersky, but Dr. Web was nothing but problems for us whenever we encountered it in the past.
 
Ah, yeah, there's also 4PSA's Clean Server. That's a wrapper around F-Prot anti-virus I believe.
 
Righty, I have a question regarding patitioning the hard drive on install.

In the manual it says

SWAP -> twice RAM size
/boot -> 128 MB
/ -> System + /tmp + Plesk updates. 5-10 GB should be enough.
/usr/local -> 1 GB (Plesk itself is installed there)
/var -> the rest of the space (domains, mail, backups, databases are stored there)
Click to expand...

When it mentions
/ -> System + /tmp + Plesk updates. 5-10 GB
Click to expand...
does it mean the combined partitions or each partion?

If it's combined, what should each one be?

I then came accross this post by atomicturtle which said
first partition, /boot, I keep this around 256-512MB. This is to ensure that the partition is on the first 1024 cylinders of the disk. Some older bioses cant handle booting if you're over that. The secret here is that it also lets you build raid mirrors AFTER the partitions have been set up.

Second partition, swap, I go with between x1 and x2 the amount of ram.

Last partition /, all remaining space goes there.
Click to expand...

Surely that contradicts SWSofts recommendations. I'm not say atomicturtle is wrong, but which method is best? I want to get the max space out of my 2 x 72GB drives (more then likely run RAID now) for hosting, but don't want to comprimise the running of the server, updates, and security. On top of this, what the heck is ext2 and ext3. CentOS 5 selects ext3 by default. Please don't tell me that will mess things up.

Help :confused:


Matt
 
Hi Matt,

Both suggestions are sound really - in reality you could stick the whole lot in one partition and Plesk wouldn't actually care, although it's not the best idea. The only thing is that it's generally a good idea to locate the system and tmp volumes on a seperate partition because if they fill up, at least they won't make the whole server unuseable.

This is what I tend to do:

/boot => 128MB (never had a problem with lack of space) [FORCE PRIMARY]
/swap => twice RAM size
/ => 10240MB [FORCE PRIMARY]
/usr/local => 1024MB
/var => Set checkbox to use remainder of space.

Using ext3 is fine (except for Swap which should be swap).

Doing it this way, you'll notice that for the last two partitions, the partitioning manager will automatically
create a logical volume and two extended partitions as you can only have up to 4 primary partitions.

Hope this helps,

Simon
 
Hi again,

Two other things:

1. You can accept all the defaults for installing the GRUB boot loader.

2. Before you start installing plesk, make sure you turn selinux off :-
SELINUX=disabled
in /etc/sysconfig/selinux

All the best,

Simon
 
Setting SELINUX=disabled won't actually disable SELinux until you reboot. You could also just run 'setenforce 0' before installing Plesk and 'setenforce 1' afterwards. No need to reboot.
 
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