[BlueOnyx:08043] Re: Thoughts on setup

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Aaron,

> In case this helps anyone...

Many thanks for your feedback. It is appreciated. I'm currently coping with 
the effects of fever and flu and am therfore not at my best form. My apologies 
in advance if parts of my answers aren't too diplomatic or well formulated, as 
I'm not really up to full speed at the moment.

> I have a Sun Fire X2200 AMD-based server that I've been trying to get
> set up. First I tried CentOS 5.6 with 5106R, only to learn that it still
> uses PHP 5.1.6 and can't be upgraded in any logical fashion. So today I
> tried CentOS 6.0 with 5107R.

Very well.
 
> In both cases the ISO on the BlueOnyx web site that has CentOS bundled
> does not work for me. Both times the install process complained of
> storage errors (not enough space?), 

Yes, first reports about this particular problem came in sometime last week 
and I released the BlueOnyx-5107R-SL-6.0-20110803.iso ISO with some fixes 
which were supposed to mitigate that problem. Apparently that didn't entirely 
work, so I will have to look further into this issue.

> Using the tarball installer on 5106R worked pretty much as expected. The
> fact that it changed the admin password to "blueonyx" at the end threw
> me for a loop for a while--I thought I had locked myself out of the
> system--but eventually I figured it out. 

Hmm. Weird. At the end of the installation the installer shows this text on 
the screen:

The installation has finished!

Please point your browser to http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/login and login with 
username 'admin' and password 'blueonyx'

** Your root password is same as admin password. **
** SSH root logins are disabled by default now!  **

So the information about the changed password is there and I can only guess 
that you must have overlooked that info.

> The tarball installer on 5107R downloaded all the packages it was
> supposed to (or at least I think it did), and appeared to complete
> successfully, but something is clearly wrong. When I go to the server's
> IP I get the welcome page with the BlueOnyx logo and Start button, but
> when I click Start I get redirected in a loop through flow.php (part of
> Sausalito) to the login page, which immediately redirects me back to the
> welcome screen with the Start button.

That "loop" happens if the admin password is not set to "blueonyx". For the 
initial setup the password must be "blueonyx", or you cannot login to the GUI.

> (Still referring to 5107R) when I reboot the server, it gets stuck and
> "CentOS Linux 6.0" once the white loading bar has traveled all the way
> across the bottom of the screen at boot time. If I press Alt+F2, I can
> sign in at a prompt in text mode, but it's supposed to be loading GNOME
> (and it was before I installed BlueOnyx).

Gnome? Sorry, but that ain't gonna work. Please see this URL:

http://www.blueonyx.it/index.php?page=tar-ball-installer

The tarball installer is designed to work on a box with a minimal install of 
the OS in question. May that be CentOS5 (for 5106R) or SL6, RHEL6 or CentOS6 
for the 5107R tarball.

The highest runlevel that a 5106R or 5107R server has, is runlevel 3. But if 
you install any kind of graphical desktop, then the box will try to boot into 
the higher runlevels that the desktop needs. That then causes a lot of things 
to fall flat onto their nose.

Typically the only application group that you should install for such a base 
install is "Base". Anything else you'll need will be fetched by the tarball 
installer.

> The reason I need this set up at all is to upgrade from a server that is
> currently running a broken version of BlueQuartz. If BlueOnyx didn't
> have the /home-must-be-a-separate-partition requirement (which I don't
> understand), I could just do a straight upgrade with the tarball
> installer, but of course that's not possible.

No, a straight upgrade wouldn't be possible, regardless if /home is a separate 
partition or not. And installing BlueOnyx onto a box that already has 
BlueQuartz on it is not supported and I can easily see why you got a ton of 
follow up errors and even segmentation fauls or other hang ups during this 
process. 

The names of certain libraries or utilities have changed from CentOS4 to 
CentOS5 and CentOS6. So after such an attempted and unsupported upgrade there 
will be stuff left around on the disk which was compiled for CentOS4 and which 
no longer works on the newer OS. So this is really, really a bad idea.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber