enterprise 3 install/upgrade question

[Tony Canning]

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 11:08 +0100, Tony Canning wrote:

>> I have been asked to maintain and support a Dell Poweredge 2550 running 
>> Redhat  Enterprise 3.  It is a file server with 2 main applications, 
>> journyx & phplist.  The IT staff who set it up are no longer with our 
>> company and there is virtually no documentation.  The rest of our 
>> network is a mixture of solaris and W2K.
>  
>
Rick Stevens wrote:

>> Enterprise 3 is pretty long in the tooth.  Current release is Enterprise
>> 4.3.  

Thanks Rick 

I have no budget or resources to upgrade it right now I'm afraid

Is journyx the timesheet/project management thingie?  And IIRC,
>> phplist is a CRM or mailing list application.

You've got it, yes

>> My problem is that it appears to be a very minimal install, with no 
>> GUIs, applications, browser, tools etc.  I would like to get something 
>> like KDE running and also install all the tools and packages and updates 
>> to make it easy to manage.  My immediate goal is to make journyx 
>> accessible to a new W2K+3 Active Directory system.
>  
>

>> You'll need Samba installed to join an ADS domain.  As far as KDE and
>> such, you really don't need that for a server.  You can install it, but
>> it's a bit much simply for management.  99% of what you need to do can
>> be done via command line.

One reason for the GUI is for MSWindows technical staff to feel more comfortable supporting it, I don't mind command line myself.  Although I prefer to at least have the option of a GUI

>> Check your current disk usage (as root, run "df -h") to make sure you
>> have space (primarily on the "/usr" filesystem) to add more stuff.  If
>> you have the room, I'd suggest you install Webmin
>> (http://www.webmin.com/).  It's a web-based Linux management system and
>> makes remote management of the system a lot easier.
>> 

thanks, that sounds useful. There is 5GB free in /usr.  As it stands at the moment the machine has no web access (or browser, or Xfree86 configured)

>> Note that webmin won't help you manage Samba, however (there's too many
>> options for Webmin to do it).  However, if all you want to do is make
>> the Linux box join a Windows domain, that I and others on the list can
>> help you with.  I have a number of Samba servers in a W2k3 domain.

Ok - I was planning to install samba but am nowhere near that stage yet. My most urgent problem is for the w2k3 domain to be able to talk to this box as an apache web server - I suspect there is also an internal routing problem I need to fix.

>> I have the original installation package (9 CDs) but if I boot from the 
>> CD I don't see any option to add packages, and the process aborts when 
>> it attempts to create a new root partition.  I cannot risk changing any  
>> system or application files because I have no way or restoring the 
>> current setup at the moment.
>
>  
>

>>> It can't create a new root partition because all of the disk is probably
>>> committed to existing partitions.  If you simply want to add more
>>> packages, the command line tool to use is (strangely enough!) called
>>> "redhat-config-packages".  Run that as the root user. 
>
>Sadly, like many command line operations I have tried, redhat-config-packages fails, with various undefined environment variables.  This seems to be a VERY unconfigured basic setup.
>
>>>  Once you've added
>>> the packages, don't forget to do an update...the stuff on the CDs is
>>> really old.  Check with Red Hat about your entitlement status for
>>> updates.  My guess is that it's expired.
>
>I'm sure you're right, I doubt it was ever registered with RH properly as well.
>  
>
>> any advice gratefully appreciated
>  
>

>> Those are some ideas.  What do you think?

Thanks, this is helpful stuff - in the short term, I am trying to avoid a major reinstall (I do have other linux machines (such as SUSE 9.3)), which would entail re-installing the applications and then importing the data, although the long term solution will probably be something like this.

In the short-term I may be better off re-installing enterprise 3 on another platform to give myself a more functional system, and then transferring the data which should be relatively easy across 2 identical versions?

thanks again
Tony
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