I used this some years ago for class when it was called e-smith and it was a very nice server setup that was administered from a web browser.
The test machine is a dell SFF gx270 with P4 2.6ghz, 1 gig DDR ram, 320 gig IDE hd. There is no cd so i opened the top and plugged in a cd using a long ide cable. The machine is very compact, about the size of a large 3 ring binder with 6 usb ports, low profile agp, pci etc and it has a SATA controller. We debated putting in one of the sata drives lying around but this old IDE drive should be fine. It also has an Nvidia 6600 256mb video card which is totally wasted in a server. We decided to leave the sata cable and the video card in the machine if we later need to use it as a ubuntu desktop for class.
The version we booted from cd is 7.4 and the main page for the distro is at http://wiki.contribs.org/Main_Page. This version is based on Centos.
The installation menu uses the old text config that will be familiar to anyone who grew up on red hat. You choose a language, a time zone and reformat the hard drive. It then starts installing the packages about 1.2 gig worth - 522 packages to be exact which takes about 4 minutes as the text installer flies. This gives us time to read the FAQ's.
Interesting, if you change the boot loader from grub to lilo you can run it on a mac mini (intel only). Unfortunately our mac mini is G4 so no joy there - however it is running osx server which is a very nice distro.
Done installing so we reboot. We will leave the CD connected for now in case we need it but we take out the cd-rom. The os starts up and mounts the ext3 fle system and then starts creating quota files which take a very long time. I also thought it was hung and was ready to swith to the other console.
Now some questions. We choose an administrator password. Next is the server name. Next we choose an IP address. This is a fixed one - not a dhcp. I assume we can change that later.
Lets give it 192.168.1.37 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 and we choose it not to act as a router but to be just a server. I recall now that i used this as a router (server/gateway) many years ago when it first came out as it was less trouble than fiddling with red hat all the time. The machine was an old 486 with 2 network cards, one cat 3 for the cable modem and 1 coax for the 10 base T internal network. Since the server supported both samba and appletalk it provide a whopping 2 gig of storage for my coax network of a 586, a 486, a 386 for Doom fragfests and a mac.
Once the configuration questions are finished the settings are written and the machine finishes booting to the login prompt:
We login as root with our admin password. Success. Now from the machine we are writing this one we open a new tab in Firefox and goto http://192.168.1.37 and success - a web page with a message 'This web site under construction' is displayed. Ok we need the admin interface.
Best read the adminstration manual on the wiki. Damn - the wiki is down. I seem to remember that in the old e-smith version you did not log in as root but as admin. Let's reboot the system and see.
Success- logging in at the # prompt as admin with the administrator password brings up a text configuration menu. There is a new option - back up to a USB device. Let's try the server manager option. There is the info - use a web browser and goto /server-manager or use the text mode browser (lynx) from the console. Back to our machine here and firefox.
Succes - except that firefox complains the security certificate from sff is invalid so we have to create an exception. Once that is done we get a login box. We don't have any users so lets try logging in as admin. Success - the admin page is displayed.
Ok - let's play
First we change the windows workgroup name from mitel to workgroup. We set up a user and it will not allow a weak user password but it did allow us to create a weak root password! We will have to look into overidding the security policies tomorrow.
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