Curiously Nerdy » Sysop

Gentoo Installation Bullet-point List

Josh Perry — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:21:54 +0000

I install Gentoo often enough that the Gentoo Handbook is way too verbose, but not often enough to memorize the steps involved. This list is meant mainly for me, but also for anyone who is comfortable enough in Linux to know what to do with a description like “Partition disk and create file systems”.

Config network, ip addr/dhcpcd

Partition Drive
Create Filesystems

mkswap & swapon

Mount root at /mnt/gentoo
Mount boot at /mnt/gentoo/boot

date

cd /mnt/gentoo

Get stage3 and portage snapshot archives
links http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/mirrors.xml tar jxvfp stage3*.tar.bz2 tar jxvf portagesnapshot.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/gentoo/usr

Edit /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf
Set CHOST CFLAGS; set MAKEOPTS=”-j<2*#ofCPUs>”
See http://gentoo-wiki.com/Safe_Cflags
Consider “-march=native -O2 -pipe”

Set USE flags

mirrorselect -i -o >> /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf mirrorselect -i -r -o >> /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf

select locales in /etc/locale.gen
cp /etc/resolve.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/resolv.conf


mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc

mount -o rbind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev
chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash

env-update

source /etc/profile
emerge --sync
eselect profile list

eselect profile set #
locale-gen

emerge vim emerge pciutils

Choose a timezone
vim /etc/conf.d/clock


mkdir /etc/portage

cat "sys/gentoo-sources -docs symlink" > /etc/portage/package.use

emerge gentoo-sources

config and install kernel
make && make modules_install && make install


setup /etc/fstab

set /etc/conf.d/hostname setup /etc/conf.d/net rc-update add net.eth0 default

set root passwd

emerge syslog-ng rc-update add syslog-ng default emerge vixie-cron rc-update add vixie-cron default emerge slocate emerge dhcpcd

on x86 emerge grub
on x86_64 emerge grub-static

setup /boot/grub/grub.conf
———————————————————-
default 0 timeout 10 splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz


title=Gentoo Linux Newest

root (hd0,0)

kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3 video=vesafb:mtrr:3,ywrap,1024x768-32@85

title=Gentoo Linux Previous root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz.old root=/dev/hda3 init=/bin/bb
———————————————————–
grub --no-floppy grub> root (hd0,0) (Specify where your /boot partition resides) grub> setup (hd0) (Install GRUB in the MBR) grub> quit (Exit the GRUB shell)

exit cd umount /mnt/gentoo/boot /mnt/gentoo/dev /mnt/gentoo/proc /mnt/gentoo reboot

Modifying only directory permissions using find

Josh Perry — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 02:53:35 +0000

I recently went through my web directories and updated the permissions to be more inline with recommended security practices. When setting web file permissions in Linux you want to set execute permissions on a directory to allow listing and traversal, but you don’t want to set execute permissions on the files for security reasons.

Doing this directory by directory by hand would have been a pain so I decided to get creative. Well as far as script-fu goes this is pretty tame(lame?) but it worked well for me.

To set the permissions on a the /var/www/ folder and all sub-folders of use this command:
find /var/www -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod -v 755

Conversely if you only want to update the permissions on only files you can use the same command but substitute -type f for -type d.

The -print0 argument will make find null terminate each of the paths instead of newline terminating them and the -0 argument tells xargs to expect argument terminated by null instead of whitespace. Without these options xargs would misinterpret pathnames with spaces as multiple arguments.

Backing up local files on your Data Protection Management Server

Josh Perry — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:31:00 +0000

When creating a new protection group in DPM 2007 RTM you are presented with a list of computers on your network that have the DPM client installed. The DPM server itself is in this list as it also runs the client for various reasons, including the ability to be backed up by another DPM server.

When you go to expand the local DPM server node you find a very small, or non-existent list of data that can be protected. If you are running the DPM SQL database on the local machine, that will be the only thing available, otherwise there is absolutely nothing.

Local Protection Disabled

DPM 2007 SP1 now includes the ability to protect resources local to the DPM server itself. This feature is being described by Microsoft as a way to build an all-in-one branch office server. You can now run DPM on the same server that is providing file sharing, database, and other services to your branch office and use it to protect that data. Once the branch-offic DPM server is protecting its local data you can then use the DPM server at your main office to protect it, “Instant Disaster Recovery” says Microsoft.

Configuration

This new feature is implicitly disabled and must be enabled using a powershell cmdlet. Enable this feature using the Set-DPMGlobalProperty cmdlet, launch a DPM Management Shell session and enter the following incantation:

Set-DPMGlobalProperty –AllowLocalDataProtection $true my-dpm-server

If for some reason you need/want to disable this feature, just change $true to $false.

Now when creating a new protection group you should see the Shares and Volumes nodes available under your DPM server where only DPMDB existed before.

Local Protection Enabled

Using

This feature came not a moment too soon. We don’t currently need it for a branch-office configuration but I do need this feature rather badly for doing disk image backups of our VMWare infrastructure using DPM. VMWare’s Consolidated Backup mounts remote disk images as local directories, and without this feature I would have to use a third machine to act as the VCB proxy. Having a proxy would require not only another machine, but another node in the data flow between my VMs and tape.

I’ll explain indepth how I am using DPM to backup VMWare Infrastructur using VMWare Consolidated Backup in a future post.