Looking for help setting up a CentOS server on Proliant ML350 G4
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Looking for help setting up a CentOS server on Proliant ML350 G4
Long time lurker, rarely if ever post. I've always wanted to give Linux a shot in the past but never had the knowledge. Currently, I'm a networking student and finally have a course focused on CentOS. It is a blast and I'm finding that the more I work with it, the more I want to learn about it. Up until now, I've had CentOS running in a virtualbox, which is fine for doing labs and learning. However, I want to incorporate it into my home network.
That brings me to today. A friend has a HP Proliant ML350 G4. I've been looking on HP's site and it seems that it supports RH, so am I safe to assume CentOS will run on it? My intent here is to run a CentOS home server, not Windows. So if for some reason I won't be able to get this to work I'm going to pass on it. Right now, I have a Cisco 2821 router that hands out IP addresses for my network. What I would like, is to move that off of the router and onto the linux server. I read the DHCP tutorial on this site so I think I'll be fine handling the DHCP setup. I would also like to attach a USB 2TB external drive off the server. The server has 4 - 36GB hot swappable SCSI drives. Should I run some type of RAID array? If so, what is recommended? Again, from HP's site it seems like there are RH drivers to do this but I want to make sure I will be able to with CentOS.
For right now, I don't think I want to run a domain. I'm more looking at running DHCP, Nagios, and somehow give access to the external storage to people. Maybe FTP is the way to do this? I'm not sure, looking for direction. I have a desktop and laptop at home in my office. There is another desktop and 3 smartphones that will connect wirelessly.
I'm very new to this so if you need any additional information please let me know. This forum seems like an amazing community and I'm glad to be part of it. Thank you ahead of time for any help I can get.
In fact, see www.linuxtopia.org for (pretty much) the full set of free to read manuals.
HTH and feel free to post more specific qns
Thank you for the reply. That is what I figured about RHEL and CentOS. Thought I would ask regardless. For #2, I don't know. The disk space seems like over kill as I have the 2 TB external I'd like to use. I thought it might be nice to use as redundancy. I'll take a look at your links. For DHCP, the tutorial I found on this site went through reservations so I think I can make do with that.
I guess now that I look at my needs my current network is sufficient. I just want more exposure to Linux in a networked environment. I recently got my CCNA and learned by doing plenty of hands on here at home. That is how I want to approach Linux, hands on at home on my network. That way if something breaks, I need to fix it.
I would also like to attach a USB 2TB external drive off the server.
Do not rely on one of these for production data on a live server. They are not built to the same quality / tolerance level as server components. External drives are not (generally) designed to run 24/7/52
Personally I'd probably use the external drive purely for backups; you can probably store several on there.
Unless you are going to be running something that needs(!) 24x7 uptime, I'd just use the disks as is and not bother with RAID; just do frequent backups.
If you do want to go RAID and take advantage of hot-swap, get some replacement disks now; those systems really prefer the same disk type in every slot (but see HP website for alternates) and once a disk goes down, you're on borrowed time.
Personally I wouldn't bother with LVM, as it makes things tricky when a disk dies (and they all do eventually), especially if they are all in the same VG.
Generally, have a good think about what you want to use the box for, and remember RAID only protects against HW (disk) failure; it does not protect against SW/human failure eg rm -rf wrong_dir
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