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CentOS 5 newbie install

OK, will do.

I'm thinking of compilling all this info and what I have learnt about CentOS 5 install, and Plesk into a guide for others to refer to, and also so I can refer to it when I install my next server.

I will credit everyone who has helped me, and let you all know when it is up.

Just as a spot of research and matter of interest, what servers and spec are you guys running. ie make, model, memory, hard drive(s), OS.

I'm also trying to gage how many domains I can happly host on my server. My ISP has recently changed there pricing just before I host my server (not happy) and now they use a data transfer by limitation scheme, so now I can only afford to go for a 512kbps line speed. Is this going to be enough?


Matt
 
If your server is on a 512 kbps upload connection, that's not going to be fast. 512 kbps equals 64 kB/s, so that's all your clients (combined) are going to get. You might want to colocate your server somewhere so you'll have 10 or 100 Mbps, but that might be out of your budget as well then.

You really can't say much about how many domains your server will be able to host. A static site with simple pages and just a couple of images is going to take a lot less resources than a high traffic dynamic site that hosts funny video files and has a couple of large databases.

My advice is to always use at least RAID 1 (software RAID is pretty good too if you can't afford a hardware RAID controller), so that when a drive dies you won't have a lot of downtime. The server can go on with its business and to fix the array you just plug in a new drive and let it rebuild.
 
Hi Matt,

Why not consider these guys (don't be put off by the name, do a bit of googling on them and their parent firm RapidSwitch and you'll see they're pretty well respected and established: www.49pence.com. Price-wise they are very good and although I've only recently discovered them myself, they are really on the ball.

Best Regards,

Simon
 
You might want to look at providers that do shared bandwidth. Then you're not guaranteed to get 100 Mbps at 100% 24/7, but most of our clients have their servers on 100 Mbps connections, they're certainly not paying thousands of pounds a month and they can usually easily pump out >10 MB/s (yes, that's 80 Mbps). Send me a PM if you'd like to know what we could arrange for you.
 
Originally posted by perfectpenguin
Hi Matt,

Why not consider these guys (don't be put off by the name, do a bit of googling on them and their parent firm RapidSwitch and you'll see they're pretty well respected and established: www.49pence.com. Price-wise they are very good and although I've only recently discovered them myself, they are really on the ball.

Best Regards,

Simon
Click to expand...

Do you host with them Simon?

I live in a village just outside Southampton in the UK, so I'm looking to find a Server House I can get to quickly (ish) to solve any major issues with system failure.

It's just incase I do have a system failure, not saying that it will happen. I need to check how far they are away from my location, but from the pricing I have seen I am more that pleased with the details.

All I need to check is the location, there connection/multi-link backbone for resilience, availability, and how many IPs I can have for services on my server such as dedicated for ecommerce (Zen Cart) SSL, and name servers.


Matt
 
Another issue,

I'm trying to configure my CentOS 5 Plesk server in my office prior to sending it to the server house.

The idea is to test it here, and check everything works.

The server is using a single network card, and I'm on a LAN behind a Netgear DG834N. I have opened up all incoming ports and pointed them to the boxes internal IP address being 192.168.0.100

During the CentOS 5 install it asks for a hostname. I have a few domains, one being youandtheweb.co.uk which is registered at UKReg, and being pointed to my current WebFusion VPS IP address. I wouldn't mind using a subdomain of that, say homer.youandtheweb.co.uk But if that won't work (which it hasn't) I can use one of my other domains such as ge3k.co.uk (registered with 123 Reg - more advance dns control!) just to test it out.

So say I'm using a subdomain of ge3k.co.uk such as homer.ge3k.co.uk is that what I call my server during the centOS5 install?

During the CentOS 5 install I set the IP settings up as follows:-

IP: 192.168.0.100
subnet/prefix (Netmask): 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway: 192.168.0.1
Primary DNS: 192.168.0.1
Secondary DNS: -Blank-

Is that right?

Now I create a DNS record in the 123-Reg control panel pointing homer.ge3k.co.uk to my static IP for my ADSL connection. I guess that's correct.

Previous attempts at installation of Plesk have failed on an error "ERROR while trying to check the hostname" or something along those lines.

Its driving me nuts. I just need to configure it, test then send it to the server house.

PLEASE HELP!
 
I got a question regarding SELinux.

At the Setup Agent screen when you go into disable the firewall, is it best to disable SELinux as well?

I'm reading some mixed threads of people who have had issues with SELinux and Plesk, as also issues with YUM and SELinux.

Does anyone here use SELinux on there server, and is it stable with Plesk?

Thanks for your help on the last problem. I have since check that I can ping the subdomain name under command prompt, and re-installed CentOS 5 on the test server :)

Matt
 
SELinux works fine with Plesk. Plesk even installs a psa-selinux package. Just make sure you disable selinux before installing Plesk and enable it afterwards (like the manual says).
 
Hi breun

I'm still having the same issue on the install, it errors out on:-

Unable to resolve hostname or establish network access to local host:

Error: %pre(psa-xxx) scriptlet failed, exit status 1 error: install: %pre scriptlet failed (2), skipping psa-xxx

If have pinged the name from the server and it pings ok.

I'm pointing homer.ge3k.co.uk to my ADSL/broadband router static IP which is 62.249.204.23 and all incoming ports are open in the Netgear router to point to the LAN ip of the server which is 192.168.0.100

Any ideas?


Matt
 
And you set homer.ge3k.co.uk as the hostname of your server? This might still fail somehow as Plesk knows it's on 192.168.0.100 and finds that homer.ge3k.co.uk doesn't resolve to 192.168.0.100, but to 62.249.204.23 which is not bound to a local network interface. But actually I don't have much experience with Plesk servers behind NAT routers.
 
Matt,

Try making sure that in the hosts file you have something like this:

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.0.100 homer.ge3k.co.uk homer

This should stop plesk trying to resolve the hostname on the outside.

Best Regards,

Simon
 
Excellant, thanks for that.

How do I save a file I'm editing. I'm a Linux newbie so not fully up on all the commands. And what would I have to change when I send the server for hosting and the server house? I intend to run NS servers on this box too.

Also one other thing, when I install CentOS 5 I select Server, and install the following packages:

Editors, Text-based Internet, Server Configuration Tools, Administration Tools, Base, and System Tools

Is that correct?

I didn't install anything else including BIND, DNS Server, Apachie, MySQL, Developement Tools and so on, because I felt that a lite install would ensure that Plesk only installs what it needs and that the Bind issue (as discribe earlier in this thread) wouldn't happen.


Matt
 
It really depends which editor you are using. Vi tends to be popular but I've never been able to get on with it so I use Pico which is part of the Pine package. It's not included with CentOs/RHEL by default but you can get the RPM from here: http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/pine/. From your server just do a
# wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/pine/pine-4.64-3.el5.rf.i386.rpm (for the i386 version)
# rpm -Uvh pine-4.64-3.el5.rf.i386.rpm
and you'll be ready to go with it.
To open a file: pico /path/to/filename
To search for text: CTRL+W
To page up/page down: CTRL+V / CTRL+Y
To Exit (and get prompted to save changes): CTRL+X

You might also find that installing Webmin on your server helps you along too:
# wget http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/webadmin/webmin-1.360-1.noarch.rpm
# rpm -Uvh webmin-1.360-1.noarch.rpm
It installs it's own little web server on port 10000 and doesn't interfere with Plesk or anything Plesk does, but it can be a real handy alternative to using the command line. It also has a really good Java file browser.

In terms of getting your server ready to send to the data centre, you'll need to know what your network settings are going to be (IP address, Netmask, Gateway) and replace your current values with this in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and also in /etc/hosts. You might also want to check you have suitable DNS entries in /etc/resolv.conf; if you are going to have Bind running on your server, your first DNS entry should be 127.0.0.1. You don't necessarily need any more than that but specifying one of the data centres DNS server would be a good idea so that you can still get name resolution even if Bind goes down.

Finally, you're right to do a bare minimal install - the Plesk autoinstaller will take care of installing all the packages it needs. After installing Plesk, don't forget to do a Yum update.

Best Regards,

Simon
 
Thanks perfectpenguin your a star.

Is it safe to use webmin or would that open up a whole load of new security issues?

I will be using ART's channel once Plesk is installed. Did have a few errors come up before Plesk finaly error'ed out last time.

I'm doing a test install on an old box here at the home office, then do a clean install on the actualy server once I'm happy.

I noticed during the Plesk install it puts everything on the server. When I buy a licence key for just Plesk 100 and Plus Pack will it ignore all the other features that were put on during installation, such as the game server? I noticed it installed them during the installation.

Matt
 
If you're not planning on buying a license for the game server modules, I'd just deselect them when installing Plesk. There's not much harm in having them installed though, you just won't be able to use those features.

I believe Webmin has had some security issues in past. Make sure you lock webmin down properly if you decide to install it. I like to be on the safe side and just don't install webmin.

Also, if you don't like vi(m) as a text editor you could check out nano, which is a simple text editor and also installed by default. Agreed, vim has a learning curve, but it does make life easier for power users. Try running 'vimtutor' to get to know the editor.
 
Well the install on the test server went ok, no errors this time.

Thanks for all your support guys, couldn't have done it with out you. I will say that Linux users and more importantly users in this forum are allot more helpful then other forums I have used in the past.

I'm experincing one issue at the moment, the pipe command...

I'm trying to add ART's channel to YUM, but the command line includes a pipe.

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

How do you get a pipe sympol up in Linux using a UK Keyboard layout. The keyboard indicates it's on the key next to number 1, but I can't get it to work.

Only sucess I have is using AltGr and that key, but it gives me a broken pipe ¦

Are these the same under Linux?


Matt
 
I don't know really, you could try it. On my keyboard the pipe is shift+\, but I guess every keyboard is different. If the keys on your keyboard are not corresponding to the output you see on your screen you didn't setup your keyboard layout correctly.

As a workaround you could also just split up the command into multiple parts so you don't need a pipe. :)

Code: 
wget -q -O - [url]http://www.atomicorp.com/installers/atomic.sh[/url]
sh atomic.sh
rm -f atomic.sh
 
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