Organiclea Project Log

2003

23 Nov - Taught Dave how to administer Sympa and TWiki, without getting into virtual hosts (I can teach him how to make virtual hosts when he needs to).

15 Nov - Installed StandardSympa and StandardTWiki. Morris is now ready to use.

13 Nov - Installed StandardSpamassassin and StandardClam.

09 Nov - Installed StandardBind, StandardOpenSsh, StandardRssh, StandardNtp, StandardMySQL and StandardApache. Also installed w3m so I could configure the firewall when logged in over ssh, and closed port 3306 (MySQL) for incoming connections.

08 Nov - Installed StandardPostfix and StandardMutt.

05 Nov - Replaced too-small hard-drive with new drive, same brand, model and size as the other one. But the drive geometry was slightly different: 255 heads and 10011 cylinders instead of 240 heads and 10637 cylinders. It was therefore not possible to make partitions of the same size on both drives. I fixed this by doing something that I'm not sure I understand, and wouldn't recommend trying: I created a new RAID, /dev/md2, with /dev/hda1 as raid-disk and /dev/hdb1 as failed-disk (so it would be small enough to fit on both disks), and copied /boot into it. I changed lilo.conf to use /dev/md2 instead of /dev/md0, got rid of /dev/md0 (using raidstop), changed /etc/fstab to mount /dev/md2 as /boot, and used mount --bind to get LILO to write a boot record to /dev/md2. I then rebooted, and found that I could boot from hdb but not from hda. However, md2 was the correct size, and seemed to contain a filesystem with the right files in it. I changed failed-disk to raid-disk, used raidhotadd to add /dev/hdb1 to /dev/md2, and let the RAID recovery thread recover both arrays (md1 and md2). I then checked the contents of /boot again, by (a) bringing the system down to single-user mode and running fsck on /boot (no errors) and (b) extracting the contents of the kernel package we had made, and using diff to compare the kernel binaries with the ones in /boot. I then ran lilo again and rebooted, and verified that the machine can boot from either drive. I also configured the firewall, and did the stuff in StandardSecurity and StandardPerlModules. Since ssh is working, I can install the rest from home.

29 Oct - Got the network connection working properly; the router apparently needed two LAN configurations: one for NAT (which can't be turned off) and one for static IPs. The result is two LANs. This seems to work fine, though.

27 Oct - BenjaminGeer has been to the Hornbeam Centre a couple of times, and installation has progressed, if slowly. RAID and LVM are working, but one of the hard drives is too small for the RAID and needs to be replaced. The network connection isn't working for incoming connections, and outgoing packets have the router's IP address, not the server's.

16 Aug - Dave Whiting and BenjaminGeer brought all the hardware to the Hornbeam Centre. Installed memory and hard drives in the computer, and went through the StandardDebianInstall. The network connection seems to work.

14 Aug - BenjaminGeer contributed a removable hard disk caddy. Dave reported that the ADSL line had been set up.

29 Jul - BenjaminGeer ordered 256 MB of memory for the server (from Crucial).

21 Jun - We bought a secondhand HP Vectra (400 Mhz Pentium II) on eBay for Organiclea, for £60 (they reimbursed us for it). We went with Dave to the computer market in Goodge Street, where he drew up a quick budget, then bought two 80 GB hard drives for £60 each, and an ADSL modem+router+firewall for £190.

5 Apr - BenjaminGeer went to the Hornbeam Centre with Dave Whiting, to look at a donated computer. It had a 75 Mhz processor, so we decided it wasn't adequate. Dave will try to arrange with Brian, from the Forest Recycling Project, to get a better machine from Create UK.

29 Mar - BenjaminGeer met with Organiclea and other Hornbeam Centre groups to agree on project scope and priorities; see OrganicLeaMeetingSummary29March2003.
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