Hetzner - DokuWiki

Hello,

I've managed to a DS8000 with the new unsupported realtek cards to VNC+Network install, it is quite technical so you need to know what you are doing to try this.

My Setup: I do not like hardware raid for this machine, it will be Xen server so I need to be able to monitor drives, so I will use /dev/md* style software raid with LVM.

I do not enable selinux or firewall by default, my language is set to english you can change that in the kickstart below.

About the hardware: Hardware has RTL card in that is not supported but I found a Centos 4+5 driver disk at http://wiki.centos.org/HardwareList/RealTekRTL8111b this driver disk lets me bootstrap the install from the local partition to get the ethernet working at install time. Thus VNC+Network HTTP install

Few gotchas, the hetzner USB CDROM drive is not supported by CentOS. The CentOS bluetooth startup script hangs on this machine, so needs to be disabled at install time.

You need:

1) DS8000 + Rescue system access, no LARA etc
2) Thorough knowledge of linux, fdisk etc, lots of patience
3) Ask hetzner to provision the machine without hardware RAID enabled if you wish to follow my notes verbatim.

Preparing the HDD for booting the installer:

First you need 2 partitions, 1 for the /boot of the installer and one to hold the driver disk. I made these pretty big and one on each of the drives, this way i can later reuse them in my volume groups, same size so they can be raided.

Output from fdisk once partitioned correctly:

 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

 /dev/sda4 710000 715404 5534720 83 Linux

 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

 /dev/sdb4 710000 715404 5534720 83 Linux

 # mke2fs /dev/sda4; mount /dev/sda4 /boot

 # cd /boot

Now download the driver disk from the page http://wiki.centos.org/HardwareList/RealTekRTL8111b:

 # wget -O r8168-2.6.18-8.el5_2.6.9-55.EL4_i686_x86_64.img.zip
  "http://wiki.centos.org/HardwareList/RealTekRTL8111b?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=r8168-2.6.18-8.el5_2.6.9-55.EL4_i686_x86_64.img.zip"
 # unzip r8168-2.6.18-8.el5_2.6.9-55.EL4_i686_x86_64.img.zip

 Put the driver disk on /dev/sdb4, we will tell centos install
 to read it from there:
 # dd if=r8168-2.6.18-8.el5_2.6.9-55.EL4_i686_x86_64.img of=/dev/sdb4

 # cd /boot
 # wget http://download.hetzner.de/mirrors/centos/5.0/x86_64/isolinux/initrd.img               
# wget http://download.hetzner.de/mirrors/centos/5.0/x86_64/isolinux/vmlinuz

Now we install grub so that the machine will boot from our /dev/sda4 eventually, sometimes this command fails, just run it twice it's always worked 2nd time for me:

# grub-install --no-floppy /dev/sda

Now we need to make a file to configure grub:

# vi /boot/grub/menu.lst

Put the following in it:

default=0
timeout=2

title CentOS Install
kernel (hd0,3)/vmlinuz linux ks=hd:sda4:/ks.cfg ip=dhcp
initrd (hd0,3)/initrd.img

This tells the machine to boot and get a kickstart file from /dev/sda4:/ks.cfg, lets create a ks.cfg:

# vi /boot/ks.cfg

Put the following in it:

install
lang en_GB
keyboard uk
url --url http://download.hetzner.de/mirrors/centos/5.0/x86_64/
skipx
driverdisk sdb4 --type vfat
vnc --password=secret
firewall --disabled
selinux --disabled
services --disabled bluetooth

Notice that this sets the language to en_GB, you can set it to de_DE.UTF-8 for German etc, same goes for keyboard

This will get the install to the point where it will load the kickstart file from /dev/sdb4, insert the driver disk thereby enabling the ethernet card and get the IP over DHCP.

It will then start the VNC server and assume you want to install CentOS from the download.hetzner.de mirror.

It will set the vnc password to 'secret' change it in the ks file to what you want, it will not start any firewall or selinux and it will disable bluetooth. Bluetooth hangs the server.

Now you can boot your server, and in some time you can: $ vncviewer <your hetzner ip>:1

from somewhere else.

Thats it! CentOS 5 + DS 8000 + VNC Install without LARA.

Now you probably want to upgrade your kernel, or install XEN kernel etc? This is how to do it.

First you need to visit the Realtek site and get the drivers: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=5&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

Save drivers anywhere, I used /root/rtldrivers:

# cd /root/rtldrivers/
# tar -xjf r8168-8.003.00.tar.bz2
# cd r8168-8.003.00
# yum install kernel-xen kernel-xen-devel
# ls -l /lib/modules
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Nov 3 13:03 2.6.18-8.1.15.el5xen
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Nov 3 12:13 2.6.18-8.el5

We want to build driver for the new zen kernel 2.6.18-8.1.15.el5xen, so edit Makefile in driver src dir and set:

from:
KVER := $(shell uname -r)

to:
KVER := 2.6.18-8.1.15.el5xen

In the root of the driver source, do:

# make all
# depmod 2.6.18-8.1.15.el5xen

Now adjust grub etc to load your new kernel and reboot

# reboot

Machine wil come up with new kernel with network card support, you need to do this everytime you update kernel.

Artikel aus dem Hetzner-Forum: http://forum.hetzner.de/wbb2/thread.php?threadid=9888&hilight=centos