RJM62
Touchdown! Greaser!
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2007
- Messages
- 13,157
- Location
- Upstate New York
- Display Name
Display name:
Geek on the Hill
I had to do a bare-metal installation of Debian with LAMP today. I'm not sure whether I'd ever done one before. If I did, it was was a long time ago. I've been a Red Hat / Centos / Fedora guy for a long time.
I do use Linux Mint (which is Debian-based) on some of my desktops and laptops, and I've long used Mepis to fix unbootable Windows machines, but I don't believe I've ever set up or used a Debian server before.
What happened was that I needed a local testing server. I'd been using one of my servers at Equinix in Chicago for testing, but the bandwidth was starting to add up. So I dragged an old Athlon X2 machine out of the basement and decided to install RHEL 7 on it.
The problem was that RHEL 7 vomited on the nVidia NIC. Then I tried CentOS 7, and predictably, the same thing happened. I tried a handful of NICs that I had in the basement, but none of them worked. Apparently RH ditched kernel support for a whole ****load of non-gigabit NICs in RHEL 7.
I suppose there are drivers out there somewhere, but I really didn't feel like farting around on forums looking for them. Because I have only a free developer license for RHEL, they won't talk to me; so the only support is from the forums.
I also didn't feel like making a 200-mile round-trip to and from Microcenter just to buy a NIC that RHEL would like. (No, there's no place closer. I checked.) I thought about ordering one from Amazon or borrowing the unused Intel WiFi adapter from my Windows desktop (which RHEL does support, for some unfathomable reason). But then I figured I'd give Debian a shot. A friend of mine converted to it recently and he hasn't stopped talking about how great it is. So I downloaded the Debian Netinstall ISO, burned it, and popped it in.
Everything just worked. No missing dependencies, no unreachable hosts, no indecipherable hardware errors, none of that. I installed a minimal Debian OS, Apache, MySQL, and PHP; created a virtual host; uploaded an existing site into it; and presto, there it was.
I was actually surprised. I'd never done such an easy server installation. I've had more trouble with some pre-compiled VMs than I did with this bare-metal install.
The only change I had to make was editing the PHP configuration to run code beginning with <? rather than <?php. That was it. Total time from popping the disk in the drive to having a fully-functional Web server was about 45 minutes, on old hardware and my recently-upgraded 75 Mbps Internet connection, with not a single cuss word uttered.
Rich
I do use Linux Mint (which is Debian-based) on some of my desktops and laptops, and I've long used Mepis to fix unbootable Windows machines, but I don't believe I've ever set up or used a Debian server before.
What happened was that I needed a local testing server. I'd been using one of my servers at Equinix in Chicago for testing, but the bandwidth was starting to add up. So I dragged an old Athlon X2 machine out of the basement and decided to install RHEL 7 on it.
The problem was that RHEL 7 vomited on the nVidia NIC. Then I tried CentOS 7, and predictably, the same thing happened. I tried a handful of NICs that I had in the basement, but none of them worked. Apparently RH ditched kernel support for a whole ****load of non-gigabit NICs in RHEL 7.
I suppose there are drivers out there somewhere, but I really didn't feel like farting around on forums looking for them. Because I have only a free developer license for RHEL, they won't talk to me; so the only support is from the forums.
I also didn't feel like making a 200-mile round-trip to and from Microcenter just to buy a NIC that RHEL would like. (No, there's no place closer. I checked.) I thought about ordering one from Amazon or borrowing the unused Intel WiFi adapter from my Windows desktop (which RHEL does support, for some unfathomable reason). But then I figured I'd give Debian a shot. A friend of mine converted to it recently and he hasn't stopped talking about how great it is. So I downloaded the Debian Netinstall ISO, burned it, and popped it in.
Everything just worked. No missing dependencies, no unreachable hosts, no indecipherable hardware errors, none of that. I installed a minimal Debian OS, Apache, MySQL, and PHP; created a virtual host; uploaded an existing site into it; and presto, there it was.
I was actually surprised. I'd never done such an easy server installation. I've had more trouble with some pre-compiled VMs than I did with this bare-metal install.
The only change I had to make was editing the PHP configuration to run code beginning with <? rather than <?php. That was it. Total time from popping the disk in the drive to having a fully-functional Web server was about 45 minutes, on old hardware and my recently-upgraded 75 Mbps Internet connection, with not a single cuss word uttered.
Rich