? Recommend PC for learning RHEL ?
in [Linux Hardware]
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From: John Reed Avery on 17 Jan 2010 16:01 Hey. I'm a generally experience Unix/Solaris sysadmin; I've been messing w/ Linux off & on for a few years and I took a 4-day RHEL admin course about 2 years ago at a time when I couldn't do anything with it outside the class (long story). Right now, I'm looking for a good & inexpensive system to purchase for home, to install RHEL and play with it, following that RHEL-admin course-manual & other stuff; maybe eventually leading to getting a RHEL cert. Can somebody recommend one or more inexpensive & reliable & versatile PCs that I can get off ebay for this purpose? By "inexpensive", I'm ideally meaning no more than about $300, though maybe that's unrealistic. By "versatile", I mean something that would allow me to add peripherals, such as external RAID-arrays, or multi-disk devices to which software-RAID could be applied, and/or maybe an external tape- drive, etc. The "reliable" part should be obvious. Also, is it foolish of me to consider purchasing some sort of rack- mountable system --such as a Dell PowerEdge 2950 or 2650-- given that I have no rack in which to put it? Any recommendations on a particular ebay store from which to buy a home-system for RHEL, whether a blade or not? Thanks! --JRAvery
From: Zebee Johnstone on 17 Jan 2010 16:44 In comp.os.linux.hardware on Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:01:14 -0800 (PST) John Reed Avery <john.r.avery(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Can somebody recommend one or more inexpensive & reliable & versatile > PCs that I can get off ebay for this purpose? By "inexpensive", I'm > ideally meaning no more than about $300, though maybe that's > unrealistic. By "versatile", I mean something that would allow me to > add peripherals, such as external RAID-arrays, or multi-disk devices > to which software-RAID could be applied, and/or maybe an external tape- > drive, etc. The "reliable" part should be obvious. RHEL is what's known as "Stable" meaning that it doens't have a lot of cutting edge drivers. Whatever you get should have hardware that's a couple of years old, not the latest and greatest. I'd suggest you look for a 2nd hand Tower PC and 3 or 4 hard disks to put in it. That's all you need to play with RAID, and should give you enough room to have a few different servers to boot from. You don't need much graphics, so any motherboard graphics will do as long as it's on RH's hw list. Ditto sound. (Knowing your way around grub well enough to boot from different partitions is good.) Multipathing's much harder as really you aren't going to do it without fibre and that's too hard for a home system. I wouldn't worry too much about that. Have a couple of network cards in each box so you can play with bonding and failovers as well as aliases. > Also, is it foolish of me to consider purchasing some sort of rack- > mountable system --such as a Dell PowerEdge 2950 or 2650-- given that > I have no rack in which to put it? Any recommendations on a > particular ebay store from which to buy a home-system for RHEL, > whether a blade or not? Yes, because the bastards are loud. Home systems are designed to co-exist with people, rackmounts are expecting to live in a data centre with lots of other loud things. YOu can't use a blade without a blade chassis, way more cash than you need. I suggest you buy 2 systems. One a nice physically large tower with many disk bays, the other something smaller but with a biggish disk. The big fella's your mucking around box. You add a bunch of cheap disks and partition them up variously to play with LVM and RAID. You run XEN or XEMU on it and learn about virtualisation. You have different boot partitions and boot different servers directly as well as using virtualisation. THe other box you use to play with Spacewalk, RH's open sourcing of their satellite product. You use that to build your experimentation boxes with. You monitor them with it, you configure them with it. The other thing you need to do is get a feel for RPM. Find Maximum RPM on the net and learn how to write simple packages. Then load them into a custom channel on spacewalk and distribute them to your systems. Set up kickstarts on spacewalk and learn how to build a box to specs using post kickstart scripting and custom config channels. That's going to be a strong and useful set of enterprise level RH admin skills. - grub - rpm - spacewalk - virtualisation - raid - lvm Use Centos rather than RH because you don't have to faff about with licences and you can't, I think, use RH with Spacewalk you have to use Satellite which costs. Zebee
From: General Schvantzkoph on 17 Jan 2010 17:24 On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:01:14 -0800, John Reed Avery wrote: > Hey. > > I'm a generally experience Unix/Solaris sysadmin; I've been messing w/ > Linux off & on for a few years and I took a 4-day RHEL admin course > about 2 years ago at a time when I couldn't do anything with it outside > the class (long story). > > Right now, I'm looking for a good & inexpensive system to purchase for > home, to install RHEL and play with it, following that RHEL-admin > course-manual & other stuff; maybe eventually leading to getting a RHEL > cert. > > Can somebody recommend one or more inexpensive & reliable & versatile > PCs that I can get off ebay for this purpose? By "inexpensive", I'm > ideally meaning no more than about $300, though maybe that's > unrealistic. By "versatile", I mean something that would allow me to > add peripherals, such as external RAID-arrays, or multi-disk devices to > which software-RAID could be applied, and/or maybe an external tape- > drive, etc. The "reliable" part should be obvious. > > Also, is it foolish of me to consider purchasing some sort of rack- > mountable system --such as a Dell PowerEdge 2950 or 2650-- given that I > have no rack in which to put it? Any recommendations on a particular > ebay store from which to buy a home-system for RHEL, whether a blade or > not? > > Thanks! > > --JRAvery Any PC that's a couple of years old or more will run RHEL 5.4 (or CentOS5.4 which is what you'll be using). RHEL is slow about adding the latest drivers so it sometimes has trouble with cutting edge desktop or laptop hardware. Fedora uses the very latest kernels so it will run on just about anything. If you buy a new machine with a current processor that has hardware virtualization support then you could run Fedora 12 and then put CentOS Virtual Machines on top. That's what I recommend that you do. With VMs you don't have to worry about hardware compatibility which means that you can run any OS that you want. If I were you I'd set up a Fedora 12 system and then put a CentOS 5.4 VM and a CentOS 4.8 VM which will give you experience administering RHEL 4 and 5 systems. While you are at it you could put SUSE and Ubuntu VMs on the box which would give you exposure to the other important distros. RHEL 6 is due out sometime in the next year or so. It will be forked out of Fedora 12 or 13 so running a Fedora 12 box will give you exposure to RHEL6 also. BTW what's in your current PC? Assuming it's relatively recent your best bet is probably to stick an extra drive in that box and maybe up the RAM. A terabyte drive is less then $100, plenty of room for a shitload of VMs. If you have a Core2 or a recent AMD then you should be able to run KVM just fine, you should also be able to put 8G of RAM into the box. If you have an older processor that lacks hardware VM support then you can use VMware Server (it's free but you have to install it with a script). One of the advantages of VMware is that they provide a utility that can convert a native Windows installation into a VM. That will allow you to run Linux as the primary OS and run Windows as a VM. If you choose VMware instead of KVM then you will definitely want to use CentOS5.4. VMware officially supports RHEL but nothing else, as a result they do a terrible job of keeping up with the latest kernels. VMware Server requires a patch to install on anything later then Fedora 9, but it always work without any kludges on CentOS 5.
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