Convert RHEL5 to CentOS5

I bet everyone will be wanting to know this.

OK,  start with downloading the following from CentOS

RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

centos-release

centos-release-notes

yum

yum-updatesd

Un-install the following:

rpm -e --nodeps redhat-release

rpm -e --nodeps yum-rhn-plugin

Add the CentOS key:

rpm --import RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

Then add all the rpm's you downloadedL

rpm -Uhv *rpm

The system is ready, run:

yum -y upgrade

Done.

Windows at Work

Unfortunately, I have to use Windows at work. What do I work on? Solaris and Linux. This makes sense. Oh well, it is paying the mortgage.

How do I cope? With these:

RocketDock, this gives me the wonderful Mac OS X dock application. I moved the Windows bar to the top, and have it auto-hide. Much better.

VMware Server gives me a free virtualisation environment, where I have CentOS 5 and Solaris 10 installed, both running in headless mode (no GUI).

Xming gives me a fast and light Xwindow environment. Better than eXceed I think, also free.

putty, the wonderful ssh client also allows X tunneling over ssh, which is then picked up by Xming.

Looks good, huh? None of the Windows GUI nastiness, all of the Linux/Solaris/Mac OS X goodness I need, with the Windows connectivity that corporate demands.

Command Line Disk Cloning

I have my two paint scrapers ready, so you know that I am about to upgrade my mac mini. Picked up a 250 GB disk last time I was in Dallas at Fry's. Since the Hackintosh came into my life, a Quad-Core Q6600 4GB box running Mac OS X 10.5.5, I have moved the mini to the TV room, as was intended. The mini came originally came with 2 x 512 MB DIMMs and a 60 GB disk. Ages ago, I upgraded the memory to 2 x 1024 MB DIMMs and a 100 GB disk. At that time I just reloaded the OS, and took the opportunity to go to 10.5. As the mini is also at 10.5.5, and with lots of codecs and applications installed, this would be a pain. I was looking at SuperDuper!, but they want actual money for their product. Checking the 'net, I came across this nice and easy command line method.

So, lets get started.

First off, I put my new drive into a USB box and connected to the mini.

Next, in Disk Utility, I partitioned and formatted the drive to one partition, and added the Mac OS X partition table. The New disk has the label, Mac OS X

Now, in a terminal window (my favourite place), I ran the following:

Become root

sudo -s

Copy all the disk contents to the new disk, mounted on /Volumes/Mac OS X

rsync -Eavx / /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X

Now, it needs to be bootable,

bless -folder /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X/System/Library/CoreServices –bootinfo –bootefi

Bob's your uncle.

KVM and Xen

Playing with KVM in the beta release of Ubuntu 8.10. Looks like it can load RedHat (CentOS) guests now. About time. Cool thing is it let me load the Xen kernel of CentOS in a KVM guest. What does that mean? Well, lots. I fired up virt-manager in my CentOS guest, and had all my resources. So I installed two paravirt guests in the CentOS guest.

All looks good. Well most of it is. I am performing yum updates to both Xen guests, and the bridging on the network interfaces are fighting amongst themselves.

Other than that, cool!

Later I have to take Alex to her Honours presentation at school. Three years running, good stuff.

Converting an RHEL 4 server to a CentOS 4 server

# Download rpm packages from a CentOS mirror of choice
RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4
centos-release
centos-yumconf
python-elementtree
python-sqlite
python-urlgrabber
sqlite
yum

# Import gpg key
rpm --import RPM-GPG-KEY-centos4

# Remove redhat dependencies
rpm -e --nodeps redhat-release

# Install the centos packages above
rpm -Uvh *.rpm

# Upgrade the installation
yum upgrade

Thanks to Andreas from the web

Worlds worst blog

OK, just setting  up mediatomb for my server at home so that it can serve media to my dlink media lounge.  But it looks like there is no repository for it in centos or rpmforge.  Guess I need to download the source and compile.

Oh, well.   

OK

OK, next week, I promise.  New start.  Really.