Installing Centos 4.4 on Dell PowerEdge 1850
We have four Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers with 2 x 3.0 GHz CPU, 2 x 73 GB SCSI HD (in RAID-1 configuration) and 4 GB RAM on which we now run CentOS 4.4. I think hese are great servers, easy to install and reliable.
My favorite method for installing Centos 4.4 (and I have done it numerous times, trust me) is to download only iso 1 (out of 4), burn it and boot from it. There is noting specific to the PowerEdge servers in these first steps but then we want Dell OpenManage in order to be able to monitor the server in full. We currently use Nagios and SNMP to monitor our environment.
During the installation I choose “Custom” and then de-select all packages. The installation process will only need the first cd for this and I can then “yum install” the packages needed afterwards. I also include the firewall (even though we also have a hardware appliance in front of our servers) and activate SE Linux.
Post-installation:
- Remove “en_US.UTF-8″ from /etc/sysconfig/i18n
- “yum update”
- Install kernel source for being able to compile modules later on
yum -y install kernel-devel - Install NTP and sync the clock for correct time
yum -y install ntp
ntpdate ntp.lth.se - Install VIM enhanced since only minimal is installed during the minimal install
yum -y install vim-enhanced - Install MySQL 5 from CentosPlus
yum -y –enablerepo=centosplus install mysql-server-5.0.22 - Update Perl CPAN
perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Bundle::CPAN - Install SNMP agent and Dell OpenManage (see separate article)