Tonight I installed Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Linux 4.5, on the machine which was originally running CentOS 5. This machine is mainly used for development, especially when one Linux machine(the other one) is not enough for doing something. So I’d like to tell it as a “backup”. But it is more powful in the sense that it is a physical machine where the other is installed on a vmware server.
CentOS 5(actually maybe I would say RHEL 5) has some little “problem”, as per my favor. Some of these are: SELinux is too stricted that I can’t easily use swat to config samba for a simple share. Oracle database is not supported on this new system(which was my main reason to choose Oracle EL but not CentOS 4.5, I guess EL would be more happy with Oracle 10g).
Before CentOS 5 I mainly used CentOS 4.2(besides Windows), at the time I tried to switch to 5, I was somewhat frustrated about 4.2 cannot making a fast mount to Windows shares(there always delay when trying to mount with smbmount, or even worse is that mount -t cifs would crash the whole system), and the mount cannot handle Chinese file names. CentOS 5 hasn’t any of these problems, which made me exciting some time.
Nevertheless, with EL 4.5 the problems are gone too. I can mount -t cifs with no delay, and the Chinese file names are handled well. As version 5 of the OS is much new, with some parts not so mature than the long lasting version 4, and I’m much more confortable with my well known older version, I’d like to choose the latter.
Choosing EL 4.5 also helps coordinating my whole Linux development environment. The two machines aforementioned would be better working together when they are “wearing the same clothes”.
TODO: This is one of the many times that I do the same thing: Starting the PXE server side, doing some config stuff, sitting at the target machine, power on and hit DELETE to make it booting from lan, then waiting for the config screen to show up, config, waiting for packages to be unpacked … many waiting, and many times there would be something that is not working the way it should be, so have to reconfig and rewait…
So this time I use the kickstart for automatic installation. But that is not enough, it’s best that I can make some useful thing(probably using shell script) that can automatically make my freshly installed machine configured to my own flavor(such as color & beep in PS1), when time permitted, I would try to do this.
