[BlueOnyx:04088] Re: BlueOnyx on VPS

[Michael Stauber]

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.

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.

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.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber