CentOS 7 – CLI to GUI

CentOS7I’ve been playing with a few VMs as I try to figure out a new infrastructure for our office, and as part of this I’ve taken a particular shine to CentOS as a minimal build for my virtual servers. I then decided I wanted to get a few sandbox environments running with desktop software and, well.. that’s where the fun began!

After about twelvety-zillion restores from snapshots and reading, and forum trawling, and more restores, I think I’ve come up with a winning way to turn a humble CentOS 7 minimal build, booting to the lonely command prompt, into a bastion of desktoppy goodness. Hopefully this will be of use to someone else out there, if not – it will serve and a handy reminder to me as to what I did to get things running.

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PBX in a Flash – Cyclic Reboot under Hyper-V

RebootThis post is for anyone who is running into an issue where following the guide over on Nerd Vittles and setting up under Hyper-V leaves their virtual machine in a cyclic reboot… er, cycle.

Cyclic Reboot
Fig 1: Cyclic reboot error

If you are quick enough, you may catch the error (Fig 1)

umount: can't umount /mnt/selinux: Invalid argument

..which isn’t entirely helpful, but does point us to something being misunderstood during boot time.

The solution is fairly simple (once you figure out what’s happening), simply follow these steps;

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Kicking off with Koha

Koha is a fully featured, scalable library management system.

Koha LogoSo, I thought I’d set up Koha on a virtual machine to have a bit of a play, and maybe use it to manage our library at home.

Create the virtual machine

I’m using VirtualBox as my VM manager, so – first off we create a new machine, give it a name and set the type to ‘Linux, Debian (64-bit)’ as Koha is most often deployed on Debian servers.

The default settings (512MB RAM, 1 Processor, 8GB HDD) are fine, and we will set the network card to be a bridged adapter (which will give it its own IP address on our local network). For now so all that remains is to point the CD to the latest Debian installation image. I am using the network install as this machine will only be built with what Koha needs and thus I don’t need to pull down local copies of a bunch of things we won’t install. So, let’s start the VM and get on with the installation.

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Notes from Barcamp Auckland 2010

Barcamp Auckland is an annual gathering of developers, designers, start-ups and social-media types. It’s a full day event held in an ‘unconference’ like style, where the attendee (see my attendee & interested folks list on Twitter) set the schedule – and people turn up to discuss topics which interest them.

The following are the session notes I took during this years Auckland Barcamp

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Installing VMware Server 2.0.1 on Ubuntu Server 9.10

Seriously, this was simple – and even better, it’s STABLE!

Instructions for this install are basically the same as those for my previous post using Ubuntu 9.04 and VM Svr 2.0.1 – except, now we need new patch files and the good folk at Ubuntu Geek have already written a great HOWTO Guide which steps through everything you need to do – so I’ll just summarise the changes in case you want to follow my guide with the changes 🙂

New Patch Files:

Get them

wget  http://www.ubuntugeek.com/images/vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.tgz

Unpack them

tar xvzf vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.tgz

Use them

sh vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh

Remove the old unpatched files

sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/binary

Run the VMWare installer

sudo vmware-config.pl




If anything goes wrong and you need to start again:

Delete the vmware modules using the following command

rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/
rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.31-13-server/misc/vm*

Now kill all vmware processes manually

kill -9 $( ps -ef | awk ‘/vm/ { print $2 }’ )

Now run vmware-install.pl file

./vmware-install.pl

at the time of installation where you see the following message type no and press enter

Before running VMware Server for the first time, you need to configure it by
invoking the following command: “/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl”.

 Do you want this
 program to invoke the command for you now? [yes] no

Now you need to run the patch script file using the following command

sh vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh

After completing this you should run vmware-config.pl

sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

Good luck! (and thanks again Ubuntu Geek)

Installing VMware Server 2.0.1 on Ubuntu Server 9.04

The following guide will take you through installing VMWare Server 2 on a minimal install headless Ubuntu v9.04 (Jaunty) Server. For a step by step on setting up the minimal server, read the article I posted here.

Getting the Pre-requisite Packages

First up, you will need to SSH into your server, and paste in the following command to install some additional packages which allow for the changes required to the kernel and the building of the VMWare server.

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential xinetd

Getting the VMware Server TAR ball

Once the extra packages are installed, you will need to grab the TAR ball from the VMWare site, and drop it into the directory where you wish to run your VMs from. For me, I’ve chosen to keep them under my users home directory in a directory called (imaginativly) ‘VM’. The following commands will make the directory ‘VM’ under your users root directory, then change to that directory:

mkdir ~/VM
cd ~/VM

From the PC you are using to SSH to the server, open a browser and visit the VMWare Server page from here you will need to download the server which will require you to create a VMware account, and login so that a licence key can be emailed to you.

Once logged in, you will be directed to the download page containing all the binaries for VMware Server.

Download the relevant TAR image for your architecture and linux version to your local machine, and do an MD5 checksum to make sure it arrived intact.

There is also a patch which you will require, you will need a login to the Ubuntu Forums however, to access the file below:

http://ubuntuforums.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=94477&d=1227872015

From here, transfer the TAR and the patch file in whatever way works best for you. If you followed my server build guide and installed the optional SAMBA extensions, you should be able to easily open the home directory on your server via a Windows network share – or similar for you particular operating system.

Running the Installer

Back to our SSH session now, unpack the patch into your “~/VM/” directory, then extract the VMware Server TAR ball and run the installer:

tar xvfz VMware-server-*.tar.gz
cd vmware-server-distrib
sudo patch ./bin/vmware-config.pl ~/VM/vmware-config.pl.patch.txt
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Accept the default options (there are a LOT of them) throughout the installation and allow the installer to build any modules or kernels it needs to during the setup.

Choose the Administrative User

When prompted for the name of the current administrative user, select YES and type in YOUR user name (otherwise it’ll use root)

Select the Directory to Store the Virtual Machines

When prompted for the directory to store your virtual machine files, type in /home/[YourUsername]/VM/Virtual Machines and allow the installer to create the directory

Entering the Serial Number

Next you will be prompted for the serial number which should have been emailed to you for your VM Server installation, simply copy out of your email and paste into the SSH window.

Back to selecting the default values now until you are returned to the prompt.

Just in case things didn’t go well

If you think you may have made a mistake in the configuration, you can easily re-run the configuration tool by typing:

sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

If you REALLY made a hash of it, you can always remove the installation by typing:

sudo /usr/bin/vmware-uninstall.pl

and start again 🙂

Accessing the VMServer Console

After you installation sucessfully completes you will be returned to the prompt in your SSH session. That’s it – you’re done. All you need to do now, is attach to the VM Server console via your browser by typing in the address of your server box which will look something like this:

https://[YourUbuntuServerName-or-IPAddress]:8333/ui/

Read the documentation, and start setting up some Virtual Machines, or download any useful looking Virtual Appliances that catch your eye from the appliance marketplace.

Note: If you experience issues with the web console appearing to ‘hang’ ensure that you have loaded the lastest Java Runtime Environment (JRE) – get it here.

Setting Up Ubuntu Server 9.04

Ubuntu Server v9.04 InstallationThis article will address the base (minimal) build that I’ve been using while trying out a number of Virtual Environments for use in my home network. I’ve chosen to use an Ubuntu Server v9.04 (Jaunty) as my base OS – partiallybecause I use a lot of Ubuntu machines, but mainly – because it’s a popular choice with a very supportive community behind it who are all too happy to help others who get into difficulties.


Getting the Software & Burning the Disc

First things first, get yourself over to the Ubuntu Server Download page and get the relevant .iso image for your computers architecture. Because I’m installing on a Shuttle XPC Sn95G5, I’ll be going with the 64bit version.

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Setting Up a Virtual Environment

So, since we’ve moved into the new place, I’ve been wanting to consolidate my technology somewhat and make things a lot easier to administer. To this end (and forgetting for a moment the lack of structured home cabling – which I’m still working on) I’ve decided to resurrect one of my lower powered (in wattage, not horsepower) machines – and turn it into a Virtual Server from which I will run the multiple hosts which have been sitting on independent hardware until the move.

Things haven’t exactly gone without a hitch, but I’ve learned a lot along the way – which I probably could have learned if I spend more time researching before I spent time doing, but meh. I’m a kinisthetic kinda guy, so – here’s what I’ve learned in my ‘travels’ hopefully it may be of some use to you.

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