[RHCE] notes for 2/19

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Wed, 2003-02-19 at 09:34, Sinner from the Prairy wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 February 2003 01:34 am, Jason Tower wrote:
> > cerient.net/rhce
> 
> Thanks for the notes!
> 
> Some stuff that comes to my mind after reading the notes:
> 
> - for SoundCards (even ISA ones), there's the RedHat utility "sndconfig". use 
> it from command line. It's pretty good.

There's also redhat-config-soundcard, which is a GUI version.  This
version is newer and might support cards that sndconfig does not. 
Sndconfig is probably best for older (ie isapnp) cards.

Here some other comments I have on the notes (and thanks Jason for an
excellent job!)

* For SMP systems, after installation, check "uname -a" to see if you're
running that SMP kernel or not, and then check "/proc/cpuinfo" to see if
the additional CPU(s) is being used.

* When creating boot/driver diskettes, always use dd (or rawrite on
DOS), as Jason suggested; don't use "cat filename.img > /dev/fd0". 
Although the latter will work if the floppy is 100% good, and it's a
neat demonstration of how devices work as files, it WON'T REPORT
ERRORS.  So you won't know if you've got a bad floppy.  DD will tell you
if there is an error.

* Jason said he doesn't trust Software RAID, but I think software
mirroring (RAID 1) is a great idea.  With this setup, the partitions are
almost identical to a normal partition without RAID, so if one drive
fails, you can unplug it, fix your fstab to use that drive by itself
instead of the RAID device, and continue on.  RAID 0 and RAID 5 are 
harder to recover from and require much more "trust" in the software
drivers.

* In regards to LVM -- I don't think you really need to worry about the
physical and logical extents.  This is handled by anaconda for you.  You
do need to have a firm grasp of the volume group, physical volume, and
logical volume concepts.

* Kickstart -- I think I may have mentioned this already, but running
the installer w/o KS creates a kickstart file for you, based on what you
answered during the install.  This file is placed in
/root/anaconda-ks.cfg after the installation completes.  This is an easy
way to get started with KS.

There is also a graphical kickstart configurator,
"redhat-config-kickstart"  It's mostly a glorified text editor but it
can be handy.

--Jeremy