Linux NAS/Webserver Questions

It's installing now... I don't think the cd actually had a corrupt file. After d/l the jigdo version, it booted fine, but I had to restart it because the HD wasn't being recognized. When I rebooted, it hung where it had earlier, so I just rebooted again and it worked...I don't know why...

This is sort of irrelevent to my Linux/Debian questions, but for some reason my 4.3gb HD I'm using is only recognized at 2.1gb. I realize some space is lost in the formatting process, but 2.2gb is waaay over the normal limit. Do you guys know what could cause this? It's not that big of a deal, because 2.1gb is enough, but it's annoying to know I've lost over 1gb of space for no particular reason...and my bios thinks my drive is a slave. The jumpers are set to be the master...and its the only disk on IDE1...hmm

Update: Now it's freaking failed to install the kernal. WTF. I'm repartitioning the disk and starting again. I don't know why this is so unstable. I made sure the MD5 checksums were correct, I burned it slow (4x), and the installer said the cd was uncorrupt...hopefully it'll work the second time around.

 

Are you sure the hard disk isn't foobarred? Sounds like it :/

 

I just checked it on another motherboard, and it showed it's full size. I'm troubleshooting everything right now...I'll reply later once I get things sorted out (hopefully!). I'm not going to surrender this easy...

Update: I got the HDD working! WooHoo. Alright, I hope I don't jinx it, the kernal is installing. I just set the HDD jumpers to master and set the CDROM jumper to slave and put them both on IDE 1. It's worked so far.

I've got Debian installed now, but GRUB won't freaking load. It loads stage1.5 then hangs forever. Hmm...everything I've read says it has to do with corrupt files in the boot loader (GRUB).

 

Ubuntu is based on debian, and on the whole debian packaging system, but it does not share the same repositories. Ubuntu has a foundation (started off with around $8million USD I think) that manages the package repositories.

I have had better luck with Ubuntu than Debian, and was greeted with a much friendlier community. (I think I just had bad luck, but I was greeted with RTFM and "SSH is not SFTP!!!" alot in the debian channels, but later realized SSH is what 99.9% of current apps call SFTP.)

Needless to say, I've had bad experiences with the debian community, and have since switched to Ubuntu. I have a desktop, a laptop, and a production server all running Ubuntu. Installing PHP5 and Apache2 was a matter of:
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

It then downloaded all the dependencies (apache 2, php 5) and installed/configured them.

Then I installed postgresql with:
sudo apt-get install postgresql-8.0 php5-pgsql

or I could have just as easily used mysql with:
sudo apt-get install mysql-server php5-mysql

I also like the following php5 modules:
sudo apt-get install php5-gd php5-ldap php5-curl php5-sqlite php-pear

So, just a quick recap of an Ubuntu webserver install:

Code:

insert Ubuntu 5.10 CD
type "server" and hit enter
follow on-screen instructions
#sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql mysql-server php5-curl php5-ldap php5-gd php5-sqlite php-pear
#sudo a2enmod rewrite

Now, I personally like to modify /etc/apache2/sites-available/default to set the document root to /var/www/htdocs/ and Allow-Override set to all.
Now I have a fully functional web server with database. It's best now to log into mysql and set a password for the "root" user, then create another user that will be doing all the database work. I usually do this by downloading phpmyadmin and using the GUI it provides on another computer.

As for nas, I'm not that familiar with it, but if you enable the ubuntu universe repositories (a 2 step process documented for an older version of ubuntu here) you can just type in:

Code:

#sudo apt-get install nas

Unfortunately the ubuntuforums.org site has been down recently, but there are usually all sorts of people there ready and willing to help you with your ubuntu configuration.

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