Linux Edit: Help with Lamp server

okay, my school district has these auctions were they sell all there old stuff they dont want. They had all there old servers and i happened to get one for free. its pretty close to this one, except mine has this huge tape backup(that i took the tapes for)

right now its running a version of novell, and there is alot of data still stored on it from teachers and school board members, is there anyway i can view any of this stuff while its still around ?? but now for the real question, what can i do with it?? i would like to set it up as a server that my family can log into and store stuff, kinda like my school had setup but i have no idea how to do this. are there any tutorials for novell ? should i go for a version of windows server ?? any input is helpful as im a n00b when it comes to servers.

 

windows server will cost you an arm and a leg so unless you can get a free copy (yes there are legal ways) then go linux im starting to use debain.
do you know what novel distro is running on it now?

 

Windows SBS (small biz server) would be a good way to go, its not that expensive, or CentOS/Debian/Redhat for the linux server OS

if you go the windows way, you would want to install ActiveDirectory and SMB shares so that they could have a roaming desktop and all their files available from any PC using remote storage.

 

On the recovering files side of things i would say you could but its very difficult at best if ,as the ebay listed one had, it had a RAID 5 array becuase it would mean that all the hard drives and their controller (presuming its not built into the mobo) would have to be removed and hooked up to a new machine in EXACTLY the same way that they were removed. i don't know what sort of file system novell uses so booting the machine they have been connected to into windows or use a live distro of linux (like knoppix) to access the array presuming its all still working.....if your really really desperate you can use a recovery program like O&O disk recovery that can ignore what file system is implmented on the array and see what it can recover from it. this is all presuming the cotroller and HDD's themselves are all still working and things like drivers have installed correctly under whatever OS you use to try and access the array.

 

hhhmmm ok no big deal just thought i would be cool to see what the teachers and people had stored but Bender386 im not sure what distro is on it, i'll look later today

 

I bet it runs Novell Netware Server

 

At that age, it's probably going to be Netware 4.11 or 5, I imagine. Netware is a great NOS, solid as a rock, especially for stuff like a printer server, file server, and the mighty NDS (what MS based AD on); but it may not be what you are looking for (you can't generally install willy-nilly apps on it, only very specific stuff).

I would whack some linux distro on there. I'd go for Debian myself, but whatever you are comfortable with

 

while i've never used linux before, been meaning too just havent had the time. what would be the easiest linux to start off with ??

 

Ubuntu 6.06 comes on one cd, is very easy to setup, and I believe it has a "Server" install mode that installs common stuff like Apache, mySql, and whatnot

http://www.ubuntu.com

 

EDIT: NVM i figured it out

Mods - feel free to move this to the linux forum as thats probably what this will turn into.

 

ok, i have Ubuntu installed. and have been folowing This tutorial. when i try to run apache2 i get an error saying the my domain name could not be veraifed. how do i solve this, im clueless

 

I'm in pretty much the same boat here with the "old server/new use" issue. I've got my hands on a ProLiant 3000 (PII 450) that has a full rack of SCSI drives (4.3GB WU-SCSI), one of which is even a 10K rpm! So I grabbed the Ubuntu 6.06.1 server edition and went cavorting about the server setup menus and such, and decided that I needed some advice on how to go about partitioning it up. I put 6 of the drives into a RAID5 array, and left the 10K drive alone to use as a swap or something. IIRC, putting different speeds of drives in the same array makes things get ooglay.

So what i'm getting at is, should I use the server setup to make all the RAID5 a single partition and then use ubuntu's setup to carve it up into smaller ones for /home /var etc? Or should I carve off the tiny little 50MB needed for the system utilities partition and leave the rest to ubuntu?

I posted a similar request at the ubuntu noob zone and have yet to get a response. Perhaps I should have been less specific about my question and used a "N()()b needs h3lp!" subject line (those seem to get answered right away) ???

P.S. I'm posting this from a Live Xubuntu CD being run on my dead Windoze HTPC! Linux ***!

 

Go sniff around in your /etc/conf.d/ directory... You'll find a file called net, there you can set a DNS domainname.

I'd put the / directory on the 10k drive, and the /home and/or /var on the array (can you partition an array? Not sure about that)

Also, put your swap partition close to the beginning of the disk... Slow swap is something you don't want...

 

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So the root would be ok on the 10K without any sort of data redundancy? I'm not that sure what all goes in root. Well, the config manager says it's cool to partition a RAID 5 array. RAID 5 just controls the ECC/data protection/recovery by distributing the parity across all the drives. It doesn't really matter to the controller that the physical drives are merged (striped) and then separated (partitioned) again, it just makes sure that whatever is on the striped section stays in tact.

Oh, and as far as putting swap near the outer edge, RAID 5 is striped, so there's no telling physicaly where on the drive it is, just that it will be broken up over the whole array, and will be accessible through SIX (count em, 6!) WU-SCSI channels, in the event the data reaches across all 6 drives. That was one of the reasons I had considered putting swap on the 10k rpm drive, i.e. put the swap someplace fast yet out of the way, and if your swap file/drive fails, as long as you've saved your progress recently, you don't lose anything. Hmm, more confusion....

 

I'd partition up the fastest drive and put OS and swap on that in two seperate partitions and then use the RAID5 array for data. Usually for a server setup, you don't care about protecting the OS or the swap file, only the important data needs RAID redundancy. It really depends on what you want to use the server for though.

 

I had figured it would be something like that, I just needed someone with practical experience to confirm before I went and did yet another install. How many and what size partitions should I chop up the array into, if any? It's about 22GB total for the RAID5 array, give or take.

 

It depends on what your going to use it for but 22GB isn't a massive amount. I'd probably leave it as one partiton for a file server. Setup like that it would make a nice media server or maybe somewhere to store backups, or both.

 

For the most part, it's just going to host a small website, a Ventrilo server, and possibly a few small torrents. Nothing too crazy. If I get a wild hair up my arse to make it a media server, there's always room for SATA drives, which I have aplenty.

 

I don't have much experience with web servers, so I'm not sure what the best use of partitions would be for that. I'm sure you could find a guide somewhere though. At the end of the day it probably won't make that much difference if you just leave one 22GB partition. There might be some security benefits to keeping everything seperate but it might be best to keep things simple to begin with.

 

I stuck with the 22GB partition by itself, and put / and swap on the 10k RPM. seems to be working ok with just xubuntu desktop running. The server doesn't have a working PS2 mouse port, and I no longer have a serial mouse, so learning how to navigate a new GUI with only a keyboard is pretty awkward. I got the Ctrl+Alt+F1 (through F7) down, and how to get apt-get working from the desktop and back. Firefox is like a blind kid with boxing gloves trying to knit doilies. Oof!

Anyway, I just got webMin downloading, and wanted to check in and say thanks for the help getting this thing off the ground. Now that I have it working, I need to decide what to do with it... I'm also "not allowed to run a server of anykind" on my residential cableISP service, so I gotta go haggle with them about it...

cheers!