Mini HOWTOS.

Here is the letter I received this morning from My old Union, I am in the process of finding a new one. Words cannot fully encapsulate the utter stupidity of the person who sent encrypted personal data to the WRONG email address!

prospect_letter.tgz

The only reason I'm using NUT rather than apcupsd is that my ReadyNas Duo will not talk to apcupsd. apcupsd is a lot simpler to setup and install without a lot of duplication of configuration values.

We need to edit a whole bunch of config files most are in /etc/ups. But first we will start with

Tell nut we will be a server over the network.The same message needs to also be in the nut.conf. You will see this type of annoying duplication of configuration a lot with nut ( think I already mentioned that though).

Setup which UPS's we are going to be monitoring from this machine, in our case its the one actually connected to this machine.

Tell Nut we will be a netserver again.

Create the setting for the UPS we will be monitoring, I'm using an APC Back-UPS BR 800 connected via its USB cable. If you want this to be able to talk to a ReadyNas you MUST call it [UPS]. (ReadyNas Duo another product I have and would not recommend. Among other things it is painfully slow even with the extra RAM module.)

set the user that will be connecting in to get the status of the UPS. This one is local.

It is possible to check the drive is starting up cleanly, If it does not make sure you are using the correct driver for your hardware and that all the options are set correctly.

With my APC ups I see the following:

Check that data is being returned correctly and providing a good status.

• OL - on line power
• OB - on battery
• LB - low battery

To check that all is running look at the verbose output from this command, which is a list of all the settings for your ups.

Where ups is the [name] from ups.conf and appears to be case insensitive for this command.

I also had to hack /etc/init.d/halt to stop the system going down completely. This was necessary to allow the system to come back up automatically after the power is restored.

Test the whole thing is working by removing the power core from the UPS wait fort he message to say the UPS is on battery power and then run this command

If all is well the system should close down to the system has halted output and stay powered up. The UPS will then cut power to the system. When you put the power cord back in the UPS it will pop and squeak a bit and the lights should flash. After a short delay evertything will power backup again.

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To setup a PXEserver with dnsmasq and fedora is really simple the second time . This is how I do mine.

Setup dnsmasq so it is providing DNS and DHCP first. See my mini HOWTO.

decide where you are going to put the files for your PXE server. The files I mean are the copies of the install CD/DVD, the menus and configuration for the tftp server. I put mine in tftp and then in sub directories pxeboot and webroot. Create the empty directory structure now. From now on when I refer to pxeboot I mean /tftp/pxeboot and for webroot I mean /tftp/webroot. Also when I'm talking about http://localhost you can substitute the local ghost for a host name or IP address.

We will be needing a working HTTP server I use Apache as it is already used for a number of other things on my server/Nas machine. without further ado lets get on! Install apache, in fedora the package is called httpd.

The web server should have it's root directory pointing at /tftp/webroot. The simplest config file for this is

&ltirectory /tftp/webroot/>
</Directory>
Alias           /webroot        /tftp/webroot

sudo service httpd start

To test the basic http service use the url http://localhost you should see the Fedora Apache web page.

To test the webroot directories, lets create a simple index.html page and check it displays in a browser. Create the file /tftp/webroot/index.html with the following text. Save it so it is readable by everyone.

Now reload the apache configuration

in your browser use the URL http://localhost/webroot/ and you should see the text from the index.html you save above. If you do not you did it wrong, please try again and follow all the steps in order.

One more test to check that weget is working as expected. go to your HOME directory and get the index.html file from webroot.

This should look something like this

Configuration for dnsmasq for a tftp server

To change a working install of Dnsmasq to work as a PXE server we need to turn on a few settings.

Edit the file /etc/dnsmasq.conf to turn on the following options, seethe comments in the file for what they do.

get dnsmasq to reload the changes

Creating the PXE server content

Download the latest Fedora installation DVD, not the live CD. This needs to be copied to webroot. I have a subdirectory structure that allows for continuous expansion and makes it easy to update from one version to another.

Mount the Fedora install DVD and copy everything over to the img directory for the correct release (f14, f15) and architecture (i386, X86_64). See my mini howto for that.

While that is copying over we can create the PXE server stuff in pxeboot. Create a subdirectory boot and then another subdirectory under that for the release of fedora, (f14, f15). Rather then copy the PXE boot files over again make a symbolic link back to the isolinux subdirectoy from the img directory you are copying from the DVD. In my case I use:

Create another subdirectory under pxeboot this time called pxelinux.cfg. This will hold your Menu configuration files.

Now get a copy of pxelinux.0 this can be found in the syslinux RPM, install it and copy it over from /usr/share/syslinux/pxelinux.0
also copy over a copy of the file vesamenu.c32 you can also get this from the isolinux directory this is common over a number of fedora release.

So assuming you are working with Fedora 15, the current version, lets create a simple menu to boot up from.

Using PXElinux it will eventually load the pxelinux.0/default. A quick and dirty one option menu would be

NOTE: The last line, APPEND, must be all on one line.

Useful links

• Text files in /usr/share/doc/syslinux-<version>
• Specifically:
  
  • pxelinux.txt
  • menu.txt
• /thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html">Home page for Dnsmasq
• Dnsmasq Man page
• PXE Linux home