[BlueOnyx:04090] Re: BlueOnyx on VPS

[Trond Husø]

On Mon, 2010-03-22 at 07:54 +0100, Michael Stauber wrote:

Hi Michael, 

I'll reply in between paragraphs :)

> Hi Trond,
> 
> > I want to install BlueOnyx on a VPS, but this one does not have a
> > separate partition for Home. How do I set this up?
> 
> You already received a couple of helpful replies there, so let me just chime 
> in with some extra info.
> 
> First of all, it would help if we knew what kind of virtualization your ISP is 
> providing to you. If it is OpenVZ or Virtuozzo, your ISP could simply download 
> the BlueOnyx OS template and create a VPS off that for you. That would be the 
> least hassles.
I am not sure what Webhuset, which is the company that delivers the
service (the one I choose), uses for VPS. But I have a feeling it is XEN
as some of the deb-packages had names like xen in them. 
I am writing deb, as I moved from CentOS to Ubuntu to get ISPConfig
working (much easier to install), but I will gladely move back to CentOS
(5.4) if I can get BlueOnyx working.

> 
> If it's some kind of virtualization that allows to install a VPS off a CD 
> image, then it would be best if the ISP uses the BlueOnyx ISO image to do so.
> 
I have asked them about this, and I am waiting for a reply from the
technical department of Webhuset. 
> Now if neither of that is an option (unhelpful ISP or support tickets costing 
> an arm and a leg) and all you got is a minimal CentOS5 installation inside 
> your VPS:
> 
> Yeah, you can still install BlueOnyx on top of that - even if you don't have a 
> separate /home partition. However, that'll require a little more effort than 
> any other of the "usual" means.
> 
> In that case you'd use the TAR-ball installer, but you'll have to modify the 
> install.sh script a little. Open it in an editor and find the "exit 1" 
> statement in the section where it checks for the /home partition. Comment it 
> out, run the install.sh script and see how far it goes through. It should 
> probably complete at that point - if my memory serves correctly.
> 
> FWIW: I did a few tarball installs of BlueOnyx myself, even on VPS's w/o 
> separate /home partition for someone that's using a large a French ISP. The 
> need for the /home partition is a leftover from the old Cobalt days and 
> generally having a separate /home partition makes sense, as you can set 
> different permissions on it and can choose to only enable quota there, but not 
> on the rest of the system. Under OpenVZ, Aventurin{e} and Virtuozzo we don't 
> have separate partitions either and I made some provisions in BlueOnyx which 
> allow it to still play it nice in those cases. The only "bug" you may get when 
> not using a "supported" VPS w/o /home is that your "Active Monitor" will still 
> show two partitions under "Disk Usage": The / partition and /home, both with 
> indentical information.
> 
> If the install still fails: Check the install.sh script again and you'll find 
> the commands it runs. Basically it evaluates the system to see if it is a 
> CentOS5, has quota enabled, has a /home partition and then removes a couple of 
> conflicting RPMs that *may* be present. Then it installs several RPMs that are 
> in the tarball and contain the BlueOnyx and the Solarspeed YUM repository. 
> Then it does several "yum install" commands to fetch the latest BlueOnyx RPMs 
> from these YUM repositories and installs them. Next unneeded services are 
> turned off and needed services are turned on.
> 
> Near the end it does some post-install actions like running some scripts, 
> checks if the "admin" account is present (if not a script is run to create it) 
> and finally it runs the sysreset script that generates the initial login pages 
> that guide you through the web based setup of the GUI.
> 
> These steps can also all be run manually if needed. The only "critical" part 
> is getting the right RPMs aboard and all in all that's easy enough if you use 
> the list of RPMs that's shown in the tarball's install.sh script.
> 

Thanks for the pointers, Michael. 
I'll set up a server at home with enough disk space and without a
separate home partition to test this out.



-- 
Trond Husø
-----------------------------
PHP-developer
Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora/CentOS) user and Administrator
www.trondhuso.no