September 04, 2003

"Joys" of a new server

Well, thanks largely to one of the guys at the office, my new server box actually boots up. That means it's server setup time.

For no reason other than it seems likely to involve the least hassle on my part, I'm installing the latest stable Debian release on this thing. I don't really care what distribution I use, as long as it gets me 90% of the way there and lets me get the rest of the way myself. (Which is all I really ask of a distro) I tried the minimal, mostly-over-the-net install of "Sarge", the latest Debian unstable release, but I took the fact that it couldn't read or write to the HD as a sign that perhaps it was a bit too bleeding edge. Latest Debian seems OK, as it merrily installs itself in the other room.

This means I'm in for a bit of work after it's all done, and I'm not looking forward to that. I've a bunch of user accounts and data to move over (websites, FTP archive data, mailing lists, and such) which is never any fun. I expect I've got a fair amount of group/owner twidding to deal with soon, which won't be much fun. And all the config movement should be just a joy as well. This won't do me much good if I don't also move over the DNS, DHCP, Apache, FTP, and IMAP settings. Nor the PPP stuff, though I've no idea why SNET decided that PPP-over-ethernet was a good idea. Go figure.

There's also software. Lots and lots of software, some of which I've probably completely forgotten about. Mailman, Movable Type, and SpamAssassin need installing and the current config has to be moved over. I need to switch from Sendmail to qmail, which also means installing a bunch of qmail patches to allow TLS and ClamAV processing. (And ClamAV needs installing and configuring) Plus I need to make sure Mailman will talk to it properly, as will procmail.

All that's easy next to the stuff that I need to deinstall and reinstall, or to install alternate versions of. This is a server box, and I'm really obligated to make sure it's as up-to-date as possible for security reasons, so the default Apache install probably needs reworking. (I'm hoping not, but...) As does PHP, I expect, and SquirrelMail. Then there's the languages--perl and python mainly, though possibly ruby as well. I don't care what version of the damn things that debian installed, I expect its out of date and needs a new version, but those aren't things that can be reasonably tossed and redone, so it means secondary installs, which is always such a joy. Who knows what version of BIND, FTP daemon, or IMAP daemon is installed.

But hey... with a little luck and a week or so, things should be up and running. It'll be nice to have a working SSHv2 setup, and SSL/TLS support for SMTP/IMAP/POP/HTTP without needing tunnels. This new beast is much faster than the old one, so it ought to be able to weather the onslaught of the next wave of viruses, which'll be nice, and its got something like four times the disk space of the old server, so there'll be room again on the house fileserver partitions. One of the drives in the current server'll get moved over to glastig once the changeover's done, so there'll be ~15G more on the Parrot OS X box. (And there should be an actual working tunnel from the outside world to that box for folks with accounts on it)

Makes me wonder if setting up the WinXP box will be as easy. At least it's going to be a clean install...

Posted by Dan at September 4, 2003 08:24 PM | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Save yourself a bunch of work patching qmail and take a look at Postfix: http://www.postfix.org/. I switched from qmail after a recent HD crash, and I am pretty happy. It's easy to set up and seems to work well.

Posted by: KS at September 5, 2003 12:59 AM

Dan, this might be a little to late for you but the best Debian installation strategy is this:

1. Start with woody (the current stable) and do a minimal install i.e don't run tasksel or dselect. This will get you a very minimal system (about 50 MGs, no bind, apache or anything)

2. Then edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change any instances of woody to sarge (testing) or sid (unstable)

3. do apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade

4. Profit! er, now you have a fully current sarge (or sid) Debian system and you can start installing all the stuff you want. Like postfix :-)

Posted by: Jaldhar at September 6, 2003 03:32 PM

This worked remarkably well--thanks. There's still far more configuration of the damn box than I'd like (after upgrading the kernel from 2.2.20 to 2.4.whatever the modules for the ethernet adapters aren't detected, which is something of a hassle) but it's acting as a Real Server, so it's not like I expected this thing to be easy.

No postfix, though, until Ask switches. :-P

Posted by: Dan at September 7, 2003 01:44 PM

procmail?! Mail::Audit is MUCH more legible/maintainable/flexible (and perl to boot, or perhaps that's the reason). I've been happily using it for months. The only potential problem I've found is that a bombardment of email can slow the box to a crawl as it compiles and runs multiple instances, but at some point I'm going to play with Matt Sergeant's pperl to deal with that.

Posted by: SwiftOne at September 9, 2003 09:32 AM

Wow, that's a whole lot of hassle getting a new box up and running, using a BSD would make things a whole lot simpler.

Posted by: Eric at September 9, 2003 01:07 PM

Using BSD wouldn't have been any simpler--it would, in fact, have made things even worse. (Though it would make it so much easier to smack the next person who says "No, you're running GNU/Linux!" I do so want a BSD userland some days...)

Using BSD wouldn't have made setting the software up any easier. It's software, it still needs installing and configuring. The underlying kernel doesn't matter there--qmail is qmail, and BIND is BIND. Whatever BSD version I chose may have some things I want as defaults that Debian doesn't, but Debian's got defaults I want that whatever BSD doesn't. There's an equal amount of pain, no matter the base Unix variant I use, because most of the pain comes from required add-ons.

The only thing BSD would've done would be to make my command-line activities even more annoying, since I'm at least used to the Linux versions of all the normal commands. (Though not as bad as it might otherwise be, as using the OS X laptop's got me used to different switches to common programs to do the same damn thing)

Plus this is a replacement server--what's already running on one linux box is getting migrated to this new box. Some software's changing (death to Sendmail! :) but most is staying the same, and I'd as soon as little changes as possible.

Posted by: Dan at September 9, 2003 01:26 PM