With the help of Cathy of Orionhost.net I've had the opportunity to look at the latest 1and1 servers, and looked into integration issues with ASL, [atomic] and AOOI.
1) default language is set to german, which is great if you're
german.
2) yum was broken, it points to a server that wont accept
connections (a 1and1 box). This could be their firewall upstream.
3) fixed yum by commenting out their settings in yum.conf, and
used the FC4 defaults. Installed system-config-language to fix item
1 (because I'm not german, and neither is Cathy). Lang is now english (yum install system-config-language,
system-config-language).
4) They're got 3ware hardware raid controllers, which is good.
5) They didn't actually use them, which is bad. Instead of making
a hardware raid, they used soft-raid. You've still got a RAID mirror,
its just kind of silly that they didn't use the hardware raid
controller. I think it might be possible to create the raid container
from a rescue image. This will require mad kung foo.
6) They use lilo as a boot loader
7) Its Fedora Core 4 which is no longer supported as of 31DEC06.
You could rebuild this box with CentOS4, but I'm going to need to
update AOOI for x86_64 to do that.
8) It has a hardware "watchdog" unit. If this box hangs,
its going to reboot itself. Thats really impressive given the cost.
9) They didn't include the utils to fsck its own file system.
Thats really unusual, I'm guessing that they rushed this image out
the door without a whole lot of testing. Fixed that with: yum install
xfsprogs
10) The ASL kernel installs without much trouble (ie, more trouble
than “yum update”), it required one minor change to
modprobe.conf:
alias scsi_hostadapter1 sata_nv
and a manual update of lilo.conf:
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.19-6.art
label=asl
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.19-6.art.img
read-only
root=/dev/md1
append="selinux=0 console=tty0 console=ttyS0,57600 panic=30 noapic irqpoll"
11) Its a fast box, reboots only take about 20-30 seconds.
12) Partitioning is still laid out very poorly.
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Subject: Hmm
Written by breun on 2007-02-25 12:23:54
So the hardware is very cool (3ware, auto-reboot, fast), but the software side seems like total garbage (language, yum, lilo (I like grub), legacy OS, no fsck, stupid partition)...
Would be cool if AOOI could fix all of those software problems.
| | Subject: Made some progress
Written by scott on 2007-02-25 17:15:25
I'm having issues with the network card though, its the tg3 driver and the centos4 CD's kernel seems to not have one that works with their hardware. I can hack around it I'm sure, I just need to think about how I want to solve it first. I've got some additional exceptions to build into AOOI to detect/configure the soft raid partitions if certain conditions are met too.
| | Subject: yum.conf
Written by mindcircus on 2007-02-26 07:17:37
Scott, you rock. I've been looking for a solution to the german language thing for ages. Thank you!
Out of curiousity, which FC4 defaults did you use for your yum.conf?
(I plan on writing a quick guide on my blog, outlining the steps)
| | Subject: Me too :P
Written by scott on 2007-02-26 11:08:43
I'm going to start doing reviews and FAQ's here for this kind of thing. Basically they defined their own yum channel in yum.conf. I just removed it, since the FC channels are still there in /etc/yum.repo.d
| | Written by mindcircus on 2007-02-27 04:32:50
Ah, makes sense. I'd already commented out the 1and1 repo's in yum.conf a while ago and your solution worked straight away. I digged around and found the entries in yum.repo.d but wondered how they got there. (I've been messing with yum a lot so thought I may have done something in the past to add them)
Next step is upgrading PHP to >5.1 without a risk of fubar-ing it :) The joys of being a newb...
| | Subject: Done the blog entry
Written by mindcircus on 2007-02-27 05:05:17
It's here, in case anyone's interested: http://mindcircus.wordpress.com/2007/02/27/1and1-dedicated-server-change-german-language-to-english/
| | Subject: they might be fixing it.
Written by tnik on 2007-03-01 08:30:26
I've been a 1and1 customer for years, and just ordered one of their new root servers. It's been over a week and they still haven't put it up. So I called and found out their redoing their image, so hopefully all the above mentioned is fixed.
| | Subject: Thats great to hear
Written by scott on 2007-03-01 09:19:42
I know some of their technical folks read my site, so maybe they saw my notes too.
| | Subject: I'm glad someone has looked at this
Written by audiopleb on 2007-03-09 09:08:25
I have that exact same server. It's not bad. I already came up against, and fixed the issue you listed (apart from language)
They need to produce a FC5 image as php versions beyond 5.0.4 (which has a know security hole) is not being developed for FC4. I really hope they do a FC5 image, i need php 5.1.6. Badly.
| | Subject: Weird setup
Written by exi1ed0ne on 2007-03-29 15:36:44
I just received the login to my box after a two week wait. No sudo in their image? That is just plain weird.
Thanks for the rundown, as it was really helpful to go into this box with both exyes open. I'm off to try the new AOOI!
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