That’s Natty Narwahl, as in Ubuntu Server 11.04, not a typo of “nutty”.

I figured that since I moved my blog and some other webby stuff over to the Mac Mini, I’d take the opportunity to try out some different configurations and distros on my old webserver.

ClearOS 5.2 SP1

It took a few tries to get the installation about right. Oddly, I missed DHCP from the installation and had to add it afterwards via ssh from my laptop (yum install app-dnsmasq did the trick). Was a bit of a hassle to get most of the things I wanted in place, but due to the lack of all the configuration-files I am used to I decided to throw ClearOS in the bin.

Ubuntu Server 11.04 a.k.a. “Natty Narwahl” (x64, beta1)

This felt a lot more like home. Admittedly, I had all but forgotten about the usual problem I encounter when I install Debian or Ubuntu on this machine, all because of the integrated GeForce 6150 LE… what happens is I get a black screen after the grub-menu. I tried a bunch of different “solutions”, which in turn only messed up my installation even further. After about 2 hours I figured it’s easier to just start over.

Next round I did a software raid, which I regretted about 15 seconds after it finished partitioning and started installing. So, now the server is up and running in it’s third Natty-incarnation for today. For once I actually took the time to plan the partitioning a little bit better than I usually do (read: I didn’t hit “Use entire disk” within the second it comes up). Ended up with 4 partitions (/boot, swap, / and /home) split over 2 disks. So far, so good.

Typically I like to just select the preconfigured tasks which are predefined (LAMP, Samba, DNS, etc) and then spend a few hours afterwards installing all the things I need, can’t live without and whatnot. I was a bit pleasantly surprised by the manual select-option, so I spent 20 minutes selecting packages I know I need and saved a bunch of time once the installation was done. Yay me & hooray.

DynDNS?

I have to love the repositories for Ubuntu, when things like ddclient are readily available. Oh, speaking of ddclient and dyndns, they have a really nifty feature on their site which lets you create the ddclient.conf -file online and then just copy-paste in the correct configuration on your box. Log in to dyndns.com and go to: Support -> Tools -> Update Client Configurator (direct link).

That’s it for today.