(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Why, in this day and age, am I AGAIN forced to resort to 3.5" floppy disks, including digging up, installing, and plugging in a 3.5" drive, on my wonderful new server machine[1]?

Boot from CD! Boot from USB key! Hell, the machine was up and on the network ten minutes ago. Give me a way to just *write the install information into the perfectly good HDD* while the machine is connected to the Vast Interweb! What the hell do you mean I can download a program to make floppies from your website, but I can't just download a program I can RUN to make the changes without one!

Bah! Bah I say!

([1]: Because the server doesn't boot from CD or USB, that's why. It's "new" only in the "was not a server before now" sense)

Comments

[giza.livejournal.com]

> Because the server doesn't boot from CD or USB, that's why.

Now you have me curious. Just how old is this machine, anyway? The last machines I worked with that wouldn't boot from CDs werein the late 90s, I think. From that point on CD-ROMs started having IDE interfaces and could be booted from just like hard drives.

I didn't think they even MADE machines with non-IDE CD-ROM drives after 2000 or so.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It's a 1999 machine. It's got an IDE CD-rom and the option to boot from CD in the BIOS. It just doesn't work. Never has.

[quotation.livejournal.com]

What OS do you want to install on the disk?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I've got Debian 3.1 installed and working now, actually, because I put in the floppy drive and just used the three-floppy boot process from the installer.

The current trick is figuring out what I want to do with it, and then convincing it to do it. I miss my corporate-sponsored windows server machines - this "find the obscure command line option you've missed, and all the documentation just tells you to do things without telling you WHY" crap is for the birds.

(Samba. Why can't I get a simple definition of WHAT usernames it wants, WHAT passwords it wants, and WHAT, exactly, it's going to share, and to whom? Bah!)

[quotation.livejournal.com]

I've done that with RedHat, by installing on a real partition in a virtual machine, and then choosing that partition with the bootloader on reboot.

Once, I installed BSD on a floppy-less, CD-less, video-card-less machine in a remote datacentre by manually building the install in a chrooted environment.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a really painful experience.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to work with every advantage I can get, no less than three sets of documentation AND a walkthrough, and I can't get Samba to share files across the network because NOT ONE SINGLE SET OF THESE INTRUCTIONS bothers to start at the beginning.

It's frustrating.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You know, it really helps if you restart the service after changing config files. I'm just saying.

(Now it works, and I feel dumb.)

[quotation.livejournal.com]

You need to teach more.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Actually, installing FreeBSD can be done over the net using PXE, as can most flavors of Linux. I'd be surprised if Debian can't.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Debian.org says "not at this time" unless you want to boot from the network using NetBIOS.

But getting it installed wasn't a problem. Now I'm just trying to find instructions with a good set of basics about how it works. Not just a list of instructions on what commands to run, and more in-depth than "Here are files. Here are permissions. Everything is a file!".

I have books. I am reading them. I'm starting to know enough to know what to ask, but it's not a pretty sight.

Tonight I hope to get the damn thing serving more than anonymous read-only access.

Then I'm going to start installing the fun stuff, like LAMP.

[zenten.livejournal.com]

You got samba to share directories without requiring a password?

Mind telling me how?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Change the security setting to:
Security = share

[zenten.livejournal.com]

I hope that works.

Btw, if you had any idea how many years I've been trying to get that to work, you would cry.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It was the first tutorial when I finally found a site that reluctantly said "Okay, we'll give you examples of what we mean instead of just throwing jargon at you with no definitions. Whiner": an anonymous read-only file server.

I'll throw you the link I was using tonight.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Or you can just wait. Smbd rescans the smb.conf file for changes at a regular interval. Samba's cake, really. Create a pcguest account and put public shares in that user's home space.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I know Samba's supposed to be easy. That's why it displeased me so much that I had to spend two hours not getting it right.

But yeah, I'll try that tonight.