it’s been a long time since my last post..)

a story about one challenging installation, which I remembered after recent OVH failure.

hosting OVH.
dedicated server based on s1200sp with IPMI-console.
install Debian 6 32bit is required.

for what? it’s a rhetorical question and doesn’t discuss. cause it’s software requirements. just about the same reason any virtualizations that can make this task easier isn’t acceptable. earlier I supposed that system installation is trivial and generally automatic task. even if you’re should install the old one system. but exactly this task became a pretty serious challenge)

instability of work IPMI on this server isn’t the most meaning part, of course. but it adds some troubles and protracts installation time. there isn’t required system among installation templates, but with IPMI-console it shouldn’t make difficulties. in the beginning I mount netinst image thought IPMI. after a restart, I’ve noticed that keyboard isn’t available. I mean everything works perfectly in GRUB, but I can’t do anything in standard pseudographics menu. after several restarts, I’ve figured out that the only way to participate in the installation process is a forward serial console in the browser. fortunately, this feature existed besides IPMI. I’ve enabled forwarding and add this magical console=ttyS0 in the menu entry. it’s in the bag - I thought. but it was only beginning of this adventure. after a few standard questions about localization, installer informed that CD-ROM is not available. it was a pretty surprising. installer successfully booted, so what wrong? but it can’t find media with all packages. had to do the trick)

because it’s required to make a little bit complicated partitions configuration. I ran the installation of Debian 7 which is available in templates on OVH. And in it, I did all the preparings, to not wasting time on it in the required system. after configuring of the RAID I left pretty big partitions on both disks for swap. I’ve already known what I will do with one of them.) When I booted into a freshly installed system, I downloaded and deployed the installation image on the additional swap partition by dd if=debian.iso of=/dev/sdb3. after that, I rebooted one more time into the installer of squeeze and choose this partition as CD-ROM. the trick worked well! once again I thought that I outwitted everyone and my adventures ended there and once again I was wrong. literally at the next step, there was again a problem with the hardware. the installer did not want to see the NIC. a dedicated server without access to the internet is already too much!)

I reinstalled again the Debian 7 from the web interface. This system was able to determine the model of the network card. and, I was lucky to find the sources of drivers on the website of the manufacturer (God bless Intel!). After downloading archive to my spare “swap” section I can proceed to prepare an installable package. of course, to clutter the production system with any devel package like build-essential is not acceptable. but, unfortunately, I hadn’t Debian system suitable for compiling apart. time was running out and I had to do everything on the same server. The next reinstallation into the template Debian, in which there are no problems with the network. Splitting the swap partition into a partition for the installer and a section for the repository mirror. installation apt-mirror and creating a local mirror for Debian Squeeze. fortunately, connection on a dedicated server was pretty fast and unlimited.) the next installation of temporary Debian 6 and the necessary dependencies from the local repository, source compilation, package assembly. and now the finished package is copied to an improvised CD-ROM. the final installation of Debian Squeeze, setting up drivers. and voila! successful receipt IP-addresses for DHCP, ping 8.8.8.8 and already trivial system preparation for installing the same strange software.

so rather trivial task, which ordinary takes less than an hour, took a couple of weekends)