Installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3
UNIX at SLAC
Linux at SLAC
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Installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 |
SLAC Computing UNIX at SLAC Linux at SLAC |
| Updated: 19 Jun 2008 |
Please note: These are not complete Red Hat Enterprise Linux install instructions; go to the Red Hat Web site for more complete information.
This procedure does a "clean install", not an upgrade. If you follow SCCS recommendations against storing permanent data on a workstation's system disk, this should not be a problem. If you do have some data you want to preserve on this disk, but it is all stored in a non-system partition, e.g., /u1, you might be OK, providing your system partitions are large enough to accomodate RHEL3 with sufficient room for future updates (see Disk Partitions, below). Otherwise, it is your responsibility to backup your data before beginning the installation. If you must restore it to a local filesystem after the installation, we strongly urge you to buy a second disk and keep permanent data off the system disk.
You may want to work next to a machine with a web browser and access the Red Hat installation manual from the documentation area of the Red Hat web site.
You only need to create these disks once and can use them for
multiple installations. The pcmciadd.img is only needed to
install laptops! Find some 3.5" floppies you can reformat.
/afs/slac/package/RedHat/RHEL3/i386/dosutils/rawrite.exe
/afs/slac/package/RedHat/RHEL3/i386/images/bootdisk.img
/afs/slac/package/RedHat/RHEL3/i386/images/drvnet.img
/afs/slac/package/RedHat/RHEL3/i386/images/pcmciadd.img
rawrite.exe and follow the directions to write
the bootdisk.img file to the first floppy
drvnet.img. pcmciadd.img. Most installations will not need this
image but laptop users definitely will for PCMCIA support.
/afs/slac/package/RedHat/RHEL3/i386/images.
dd if=bootdisk.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k
dd if=drvnet.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k
dd if=pcmciadd.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k
At the boot prompt, you can choose between running the installation
in graphical or text mode. Unless you have an older monitor or video
card, it should be OK to just press the Enter key
and run the installation in graphical mode. To run in text mode,
type linux text and press the Enter key.
It will take a minute or two to load. Once you are in the install program, follow the directions until you get to the question on what kind of installation method to use.
N.B. There may be some variations in the order of the screens in the installation program depending on your exact hardware configuration and/or the choices you make, so it's probably a good idea to read through the rest of this section before proceeding.
Before proceeding with an NFS installation, you will be asked to help find the necessary network drivers. Select Use a driver disk and insert your "drvnet" floppy disk when requested.
Next, you will be asked to configure TCP/IP. Uncheck Use dynamic IP configuration and enter the IP Address, Netmask, Default gateway and Primary nameserver information given to you by SCCS when you requested your node name and IP address.
WARNING:Please be careful to enter this information accurately, since errors can disrupt the network.
Note that the Red Hat install program will try to guess your Default gateway and Primary nameserver after you enter your IP address and Netmask, and will set these up as defaults. These Red-Hat-supplied values are most likely wrong. If you don't know one or more of these values, please ask the help desk or unix-admin -- do not use the Red-Hat supplied values.
Next you will be asked for NFS setup information.
The NFS server name is
afsnfs2
and the Red Hat directory is
/afs/slac/package/RedHat/RHEL3/i386.
If the directory can't be mounted try using afsnfs2's IP
address, 134.79.19.29, instead of its name.
At the Disk Partitioning Setup screen, select Manually partition with Disk Druid. The default partitioning scheme used by the Automatically partition option is not suitable for use in the SLAC environment.
The table below shows suggested partitioning schemes for two different size disks, representing typical sizes of disks available on older hardware still in service here at SLAC. Newer systems usually have substantially larger system disks.
Make sure to give Linux at least a 4.5GB root partition. If your root partition is less than about 6.0 GB, you should omit installing some of the software package groups recommended below, in order to allow room for future upgrades and security patches. Similarly, if you install more package groups than suggested below, you will probably need a larger root partition -- perhaps 7-8 GB if you install nearly everything. Small root partitions can make it difficult or impossible to install required security patches later on. Systems that cannot apply required security patches in a timely fashion may be denied access to the SLAC network.
You should also create a swap partition at least as large as the memory (twice the main memory is a good rule of thumb for the size of the swap partition).
If there is sufficient space, we recommend that you allocate
an /scswork partition of 1 GB,
to be reserved for the exclusive use of SCCS.
Use the rest for scratch space;
for example, you might want to create a larger /tmp
or add a separate /scratch directory.
Note that older files in /tmp are periodically removed
but files in /scratch will remain until removed by
you unless the system is re-installed.
Always choose to format your Linux partitions. Use the new, ext3 filesystem type on all partitions except for the /usr/vice/cache and swap partitions. Use ext2 for the /usr/vice/cache partition since ext3 and AFS cache partitions do not get along (at least as of May 2002). ext3 is a journaling filesystem and will permit much faster recovery following crashes.
WARNING! You should not allocate any partitions on the system disk for permanent data. Because of the large sizes of currently available disks, you may be strongly tempted to ignore this warning. However, it is very risky to do so, because:
The best way to make use of extra space on your system disk is to allocate a large /tmp or /scratch partition. If you need additional permanent space, please contact unix-admin@slac.stanford.edu; we will do our best to help you acquire reliable, backed-up storage at a reasonable cost. If you ignore this warning, it will be your responsibility to save and restore your data the next time your system needs to be re-installed.
Note that partition names and numbers, and the order of the partitions, are assigned automatically by Disk Druid. Also, the actual sizes of allocated partitions may vary a little bit from what you request via Disk Druid's GUI interface. This may make it difficult to allocate every last block on the disk.
| Partition Mount Point |
Partition Type |
Partition Size | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 GB disk | 17 GB or larger disk | ||
| / | ext3 | 5 GB | 8 GB |
| swap | swap | 1 x memory or at least 512 MB |
2 x memory or at least 1 GB |
| /var | ext3 | 512 MB | 1 GB |
| /usr/vice/cache | ext2 | 512 MB | 1 GB |
| /tmp | ext3 | 512 MB | 1 GB |
| /scswork | ext3 | omit | 1 GB |
| /scratch (or extra /tmp space) | ext3 | omit | remainder |
We recommend that you use the default boot loader, GRUB, and accept the defaults for the other options on this screen.
The Network Configuration screen should show the same information you entered above in the TCP/IP Setup when requesting an NFS installation.
If you will be using your system within the SLAC environment, you will need to select "No firewall" at the Firewall Configuration screen. However, if you are installing a stand-alone system, e.g., for use from your home, or a laptop that will be connected to the Internet from outside SLAC's firewall, you may want to learn more about the firewall facilities in Red Hat Linux in order to better protect your system.
If you wish, select one or more additional languages.
Select the time zone, either by location or UTC offset (e.g., by clicking on a nearby city, such as Los Angeles, on the map or by selecting UTC-08 plus daylight savings time on the UTC Offset tab). You should not check the "System clock uses UTC" box on dual-booted machines (note that SCCS strongly discourages dual boot machines).
Choose a
good root password and DON'T FORGET IT!
SLAC's post-installation tool taylor will override this password.
You may select package groups or individual packages to be installed. The default package groups are probably a pretty good starting point for most users:
| RH Default |
SCCS Recommendation |
Package Groups |
|---|---|---|
| Desktops | ||
[*] |
[*] |
X Window System |
[*] |
[*] |
GNOME Desktop Environment |
[ ] |
[*] |
KDE Desktop Environment |
| Applications | ||
[*] |
[*] |
Editors |
[ ] |
[*] |
Engineering and Scientific |
[*] |
[*] |
Graphical Internet |
[*] |
[*] |
Text-based Internet |
[*] |
[*] |
Office/Productivity |
[*] |
[*] |
Sound and Video |
[ ] |
[*] |
Authoring and Publishing |
[*] |
[*] |
Graphics |
[*] |
[ ] |
Games and Entertainment |
| Servers (Please see SCCS before installing) | ||
[ ] |
[ ] |
Web Server |
[ ] |
[ ] |
Mail Server |
[ ] |
[ ] |
Windows File Server |
[ ] |
[ ] |
SQL Database |
[ ] |
[ ] |
MySQL Database |
[ ] |
[ ] |
Legacy Network Server |
| Development | ||
[*] |
[*] |
Development Tools |
[ ] |
[ ] |
Kernel Development |
[ ] |
[?] |
X Software Development |
[ ] |
[ ] |
Gnome Software Development |
[ ] |
[?] |
KDE Software Development |
[ ] |
[ ] |
Legacy Software Development |
| System | ||
[*] |
[*] |
Administration Tools |
[ ] |
[ ] |
System Tools |
[*] |
[*] |
Printing Support |
| Miscellaneous | ||
[ ] |
[ ] |
Minimal |
[ ] |
[ ] |
Everything |
2166 |
2634 |
Space Consumed (MB) |
In addition to the Red Hat defaults, we recommend adding the following groups:
Please do not install servers unless you really know what you are doing and okay it with SCCS first. And please don't select "Everything" which would also install the servers.
To find out exactly what's included in a group, click on "Details" (you'll have to select the group first if it is not already selected). Some groups have optional parts; in the Details screen you can select or unselect these options.
If you want complete control, check the Select individual packages option before clicking the Next button. Note that selecting "Minimal" will override your previous selections, but unselecting it will restore them.Note that the last row in the above table simply shows the sum of the package sizes (which will increase from time to time as Red Hat releases updates to RHEL3), and is only intended to give you a rough idea of relative sizes for different collections of packages. You must allocate a partition significantly larger than these minimums to get a workable system and to reserve space to install package updates (especially security updates).
Don't worry too much about getting every package you might ever want -- you can always add additional packages later.
It may take 15 minutes to over an hour to install the packages depending on the speed of your machine and network.Because of the variety of video cards and monitors available, configuring X windows can be tricky. Fortunately, the configuration tools have become much better at probing the hardware and correctly deducing the video modes that can be supported, especially with late model equipment from the more well-known vendors. Nevertheless, if at all possible it is a good idea to gather in advance the following information about your video hardware:
The installation program will first attempt to identify your video card and, if possible, the amount of video memory that has been installed. The latter often cannot be determined automatically, in which case the installer will guess a fairly conservative (small) value. If you're pretty sure there's more memory available, go ahead and guess a higher value. If you guess wrong, you won't damage your video card or monitor, though your X server may fail to start up.
This screen includes a checkbox labelled "Skip X configuration". If you want to defer configuring X and are comfortable using a command line login, you can finish the installation immediately by checking this box and then clicking on the "Next" button. Later on you can do the X configuration by running the redhat-config-xfree86 utility.
Next the program will attempt to probe your monitor to determine its capabilities. If it cannot deduce the particular vendor and model in order to look it up in its database, it will be identified as "Unprobed monitor". It may still be in the database, however, so try to look it up by hand. If you cannot find your particular model in the list, but you know the horizontal and vertical sync ranges from the documentation, enter them in the boxes at the bottom of the screen. Be careful when entering these values; if you enter values that fall outside the capabilities of your equipment, you can cause damage to your display. If you are unsure, it is probably safe to click "Restore original values" and use the program's conservative guesses, or you can click "Back" to return to the video card configuration screen and check the "Skip X configuration" box for now.
At the next screen you can select your desired color depth and screen resolution. If your video memory is limited, you may need to give up some color depth to get higher resolution, or vice versa. Unless you need to manipulate photographic images, 16 bit color is probably all you need (one caveat, however: one application, Framemaker, is known to fail when trying to display on an X server with 16 bit color).
If the range of available color depths and resolutions does not include video modes that you know are supported, e.g. from previous experience under Windows or an earlier version of Linux, the installation program has probably not been able to determine how much video memory you have and has guessed a conservative value. At this point, you can go back to the "Graphical Interface (X) Configuration" screen and try specifying a larger value for your video memory.
For more information about setting up X Windows, see the sections on configuring your video card and monitor in the RHEL3 Installation Guide.
Once you click "Next" on the "Customize Graphics Configuration" screen, your Red Hat installation is complete and you will not be able to go back and change anything. The next step is to boot into your new system.
If you skipped the X configuration during installation,
or if you have problems with the resulting X Windows setup,
you can try running the X Configuration Tool now by
running the command, redhat-config-xfree86.
If you can't get a satisfactory X configuration using this tool
then you will have to fiddle with the /etc/X11/XF86Config file.
See the XF86Config(5x) man page for information on the format
of this file and it's many device-independent options.
There are also device-specific man pages
for the various supported video drivers --
see the SEE ALSO section of XF86Config(5x)
for some of the driver names.
Do not increase the refresh rate ranges on your monitor
unless you are absolutely sure it is supported!
If your sound card was not automatically configured
by the installation program or during the initial boot
(by a program called "kudzu"),
you can try running (as root) the Sound Card Configuration Tool.
You can also run this tool by entering
redhat-config-soundcard on the command line,
or by choosing Main Menu => System Settings => Soundcard Detection.
Note that this tool requires that you have an X server running.
For more information, see the section on
Problems with Sound Configuration
in the RHEL3 Installation Guide.
If you have an unusual sound card, you may also have to search the web
for detailed help on configuring it.
WARNING: This is not (yet) for laptop users.
Taylor is the tool used by SCCS for administering the very large number of UNIX (including Linux) systems for which we are responsible. It can be run after the Red Hat installation program to automatically configure your new system to be integrated into the SLAC environment. It normally installs a cronjob which will maintain your system automatically.
Some of the things Taylor does include:
/usr/local to point to
SLAC AFS /usr/local for Linux.For additional information, see the Taylor Web page.
Taylor uses a configuration file, /etc/taylor.opts,
to control its actions.
If you don't have this file the first time you run Taylor,
it will install one with a reasonable set of defaults.
However, you may want to set some of these options
before you run Taylor the first time,
since the root password you set during installation
will otherwise be overridden at this point.
If your machine was previously taylored, you will most likely
want to restore most or all of the options from your old
taylor.opts file
(you did print a copy
before beginning, right?).
If your machine is connected to a
non-autonegotiating (fixed speed) 100 MB/s port,
it is particularly important to include the option,
ethernet=100mb.
If you are not sure, omit this option or check with net-admin.
If your machine has not been previously taylored,
look in
/afs/slac/package/taylor/taylor.opts
for a sample taylor.opts file.
In particular, this file includes commented out examples examples showing how to:
For a more complete list of options,
do man taylor.opts.
After running Taylor the first time,
if you subsequently need an option changed
and can no longer modify /etc/taylor.opts yourself,
contact one of your Linux Desktop Support people
or send mail to
unix-admin.
To install and run Taylor, execute the following command:
elinks -source http://www/comp/unix/linux/go-taylor | sh
You will be asked whether to use the version of
/usr/local maintained by SCCS
or set up a private /usr/local.
We highly recommend that you use the central one.
Taylor will probably take several minutes to complete its work.
If there is an error and you can see how to fix the problem,
it is safe to rerun taylor afterward.
If you have an error you cannot understand or fix,
send email to
unix-admin to request help.
If possible, paste the error messages from Taylor into the email.
If you receive your email via the UNIX mail spool
rather than SLAC's Exchange server,
you'll need access to
/nfs/mailspool/mail/<your_UID>.
Some users may also want to access
other central NFS file servers from their Linux workstations.
Access to NFS is not automatic;
for security reasons you must submit a request to SCCS
for permission to mount our central servers.
There is a simple
NFS Access form for this purpose
if you do not need any superuser privileges on the machine.
If you also need privileges, see the next section.
If you need superuser privileges
(i.e., the root password and/or sudo ALL)
on your machine, you will need to carefully read the
Superuser/NFS Privileges page,
then fill out and submit the form you'll find there.
If you also need NFS access, you must request it via this same form.
SLAC maintains a mirror of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS 3
distribution at /afs/slac/package/RedHat/RHEL3. Please
note that the use of this mirror is limited by the terms of our
agreement with Red Hat; see the file README-BEFORE-USING
in this directory for details.
Within this directory, you can find a complete set of RPMs from the most recent quarterly update from Red Hat at:
/afs/slac/package/RedHat/RHEL3/i386/RedHat/RPMS/This is sometimes referred to as the base area or directory. Additional updates to individual RPMs can be found in the directory,
/afs/slac/package/RedHat/RHEL3/updates/i386This directory is referred to as the updates area.
For mission-critical servers, we also maintain a separate directory of symlinks into the updates area for security-related PMs only; this directory is:
/afs/slac/package/RedHat/RHEL3/security/i386
The yum command is a program that can look at a directory or at an ftp or http site and determine if there are updates to any of your packages there. If it finds them, it can also install them. Taylor installs yum and uses it to apply required security updates. In addition, Taylor configures yum so that you or your system admin can use it to install any necessary bug fix RPMs to bring your system up to the latest SCCS-recommended Red Hat update level. The command to do this is simply,
sudo yum updateTo find out what yum would do without actually doing it, use the command,
sudo yum check-update.
Look in our RPM repository for additional RPMS that you might want to install (be sure to always check the updates area as well as the quarterly base directory in case there have been any recent security updates). To read the description of one of these packages, change to the appropriate directory of the repository and use the rpm program as in the following example:
rpm -qip enscript-1.6.1-24.i386.rpm
There are some known issues with RHEL3.
3Com NICs.
Two network interface cards (NICs) from 3Com,
3c905 (Boomerang) and 3c905B (Cyclone),
have a problem under RHEL3 at least through Update 3.
Following a successful installation (even a network
installation) they sometimes come up configured to the wrong
speed or duplex setting, making network connections extremely
slow or impossible. The problem does not always occur, but if
it does the work-around is to disable kudzu and reboot.
To do so, issue the command "chkconfig kudzu off" as root;
you can turn kudzu back on temporarily if you add a new device
to your machine and need to get it configured. A fix is
promised for Update 4.
Missing drivers.
A number of third party drivers and other kernel modules that
are not supported by Red Hat have been moved to separate RPMs
that are no longer installed by default. If you are missing a
driver for some device in your system, try installing the
appropriate version (depending on your kernel) of the
kernel-unsupported or
kernel-smp-unsupported RPM in
our RPM repository.
Note that none of the kernel*unsupported
RPMs actually contain kernels -- they are simply collections
of kernel modules.
Please also report such missing drivers to unix-admin so that we can give feedback to Red Hat about which legacy hardware is still important to us at SLAC.
Missing packages. A number of packages that were formerly included in Red Hat Linux distributions have been dropped from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Typically this was done when there were concerns that a package was no longer being well-maintained upstream or because it was felt that an alternative package provided improved functionality.
These include:
| Dropped package | Possible Alternatives |
|---|---|
| galeon | Mozilla Epiphany (from Fedora & RHEL 4 candidate) |
| gv | ggv, xpdf |
| lynx | elinks |
| mc | konqueror, nautilus |
| ncftp | lftp |
Missing ACPI support. ACPI stands for Advanced Configuration and Power Interface, a power management specification which is particularly important for laptops. Although ACPI support was included in previous distributions, Red Hat omitted it from RHEL, probably because the version for the 2.4 series kernel is not yet considered "production quality". Because of the importance of Linux laptops in our environment, SLAC has requested that Red Hat make support for ACPI a priority. In the meantime, Red Hat suggests that laptop users try using the Fedora Core kernel along with the rest of the RHEL3 distribution. At least one SLAC user has done so and reports that this has worked fine so far.
The default setting for the LANG environment variable is "en_US.UTF-8". However, some problems have been reported when using the UTF-8 encoding; for example, if you use less as your pager, you may see some special characters displayed as hex characters enclosed in angle brackets, like this (from man man):
...
manpath - determine user&<80><99>s search path for man pages
...
Setting LANG to just "en_US" appears to solve this problem. You
can put this in your $HOME/.i18n file, for example:
...
LANG="en_US"
...
subscribe linux-l".If you need more information, please have a look at our Linux Resources page.