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Gentoo for Fileserver

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Mr. Chambers

Member
Joined
Feb 25, 2001
Location
Iowa
I installed Stage1 Gentoo a few months back on a machine to play around with, and along with some help from you guys here and IRC, I got it to take and work, but didn't have much time to play around with it once installed. I since sold the machine, but have enough spare parts for a new one.

I have decided that I want a Fileserver, to get files off my machine so they can be used by all the computers in the house over the network.

Is Gentoo best for this? Or would I be better of with Windows XP? Mostly music and video files. Right now most of them are on my main rig, in a large NTFS partition.

So to clarify, I want to be able to backup to and pull files from a separate server computer from any workstation in the house, all my machines run WinXP if that matters. What distro and filesystem should I use?

BTW I'm interested in using Gentoo again to finish learning it/messing with linux. So unless another distro offers something alot better, I want Gentoo for its customizability and lack of bloat.
 
I would say some version of linux is better than windows. On a file server, the filesystem isn't going to matter for the computers accessing it. You can servve files out to windows using samba, and to linux boxes using either nfs or samba. Gentoo should work fine as a file server.
 
AH, thank you for the clarification Gnufsh! I am halfway through a new Gentoo install, except it appears they took out stage1 and stage2 installs, probably because of the massive support needed?
 
I believe you can still do them, they simply dont offer support for them anymore. I would suggest a samba server so you can have windows computer access the files. Simply emerge the "samba" package and google around the net for how to set up the config files. You can then map the volumes on windows computers, or mount them on other linux computers. The filesystem you use on the server is largly irrelevant (exceptions being contraints of the filesystem, like lengths of filenames, number of files per directory, etc. for the most part, this shouldnt concern you much).
 
Mr. Chambers said:
AH, thank you for the clarification Gnufsh! I am halfway through a new Gentoo install, except it appears they took out stage1 and stage2 installs, probably because of the massive support needed?
I believe it was because of the support problems they were having. I think you can still find guides out there. Check the docs and the forums.
 
Little trouble with Grub still unfortunately. I think it installed correctly, but upon reboot, I'm getting Error 15 as documented here:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-122656-highlight-grub+issues.html
Grub error 15
After hitting return in the grub prompt you get something similar to this one?
Code:
Booting 'gentoo Linux'

root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/kernel-2.4.20 root=/dev/hda3 vga=792

Error 15: File not found
Press any key to continue...

And here are some solutions posted in that thread, but my question is (probably pretty stupid), how do i get back to the prompt to use these commands? I put the cd back in, and get the a prompt, but do I need to chroot back into /bin/bash? I can't for the life of me find where to do that again... Any help or tips would be appreciated.

Possible solutions to try:
This error is returned if the specified file name cannot be found, but everything else (like the disk/partition info) is OK.

If it's the kernel that it's missing (bzImage, kernel...):make sure that the file it is referring to exists on your boot partition.

To find out what the exact name of your kernel is, first boot from the live-cd or into your existing linux installation. Then mount /boot if you've got a seperate partition, or mount / if you don't. Then do the following:
Code:
cd /boot
ls
This will list all the kernels that you've got on your boot partition.

If your kernel is missing make sure that you compiled a kernel either with genkernel or make menuconfig
Code:
cd /usr/src/linux/
make menuconfig
and you copied it to your boot partition.
Code:
cp /usr/src/linux/arch/[your architecture, e.g. i386]/boot/bzImage /boot/
 
boot the livecd, mount the partitions as if you were going to install, chroot into it, run 'grub' and then at the grub prompt run the following:
1) root (hd0,0)
2) setup (hd0)
3) quit

Then exit, umount the partitions, and reboot. That should take care of it assuming that your linux drive is the first/only drive in the system and partition.
 
OK new question, I need to recompile my kernel, I think I just left out ATA support of my chipset :bang head but after I compile it, what is it named? And I need to copy it over to my /boot partition so grub can find it, correct?

[edit]
Yes just one hard drive, 4 partitions:

/hda1 /boot
/hda2 swap
/hda3 /
/hda4 will be storage, haven't done anything with it yet
 
You forgot to unroll the loops! EVERYONE knows you have to unroll the loops and use non existant compiler optimizations!

It is a joke, laugh! Sorry, I really don't have anything useful to contribute here, I just couldn't help taking the potshot.
 
Mr. Chambers said:
OK new question, I need to recompile my kernel, I think I just left out ATA support of my chipset :bang head but after I compile it, what is it named? And I need to copy it over to my /boot partition so grub can find it, correct?

[edit]
Yes just one hard drive, 4 partitions:

/hda1 /boot
/hda2 swap
/hda3 /
/hda4 will be storage, haven't done anything with it yet


you will be in /usr/src/linux when you compile your kernel (or you should be). When it is finished, your kernel will be in /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzimage. So what you should do when your kernel is finished compiling is: Do not leave that directory and make sure that your boot partition is mounted, then run the following commands
1) cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel-2.6.14
2) cp .config /boot/config-2.6.14

That is assuming that you are using a vanilla kernel 2.6.14 release. If not, rename the kernel accordingly, but i suggest using that naming convention with kernel-version. I also suggest copying over a backup of the config for it too and naming it accordingly as well just to make sure you know which goes with which kernel. And NO the "arch" in the first command is NOT suppose to have a preceeding "/"!
 
SuperFarStucker said:
You forgot to unroll the loops! EVERYONE knows you have to unroll the loops and use non existant compiler optimizations!

It is a joke, laugh! Sorry, I really don't have anything useful to contribute here, I just couldn't help taking the potshot.
Loop unrolling is actually n excellent optimization for some types of code. It also makes some code slower. One of the advantages of profile-guided optimization (which you can't do easily with gentoo) is that it can better pinpoint which loops to unroll and which ones to leave.
 
SuperFarStucker said:
You forgot to unroll the loops! EVERYONE knows you have to unroll the loops and use non existant compiler optimizations!

It is a joke, laugh! Sorry, I really don't have anything useful to contribute here, I just couldn't help taking the potshot.

A common quote to poke fun of gentoo users, yet i don't understand it. The majority of gentoo users seem to discourage the use of that flag. There are plenty of threads on the gentoo forums of one or two people asking if they should and then tons of other people tellling them no. So again, i don't really get this empty insult. Perhaps they needed something to complain about since they couldn't get gentoo working? (sorry, i had to take the shot too. No worries though. Let's not start a flame war or anything. Let's just get this guy's server up and running for him. That's what we're really here for).
 
I'd have to agree. If you have nothing to contribute to myself, or anyone else who might stumble upon this thread and learn something - then please post elsewhere.

Now then, I have a new question.

I recompiled the kernel, and copied over again, and grub did attempt to boot this time, however it gave me an error I've never seen before:

"fsck.ext3: No such file or directory trying to open /dev/root /dev/root. The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem"

If the whole error is needed, I can post it, but what gives here? I am correct in assuming that grub see's the partitions, but that they are either not formatted correctly or are corrupt somehow?
 
That error is when you select and option and **** starts to scroll? What filesystem are you using, could you please post the whole error, and the lines of your /etc/fstab that deal with your hard drive partitions?

At a glance it sounds like you just don't have support for your filesystem or filesystem check is messing up.
 
Mr. Chambers said:
..."fsck.ext3: No such file or directory trying to open /dev/root /dev/root. The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem"
I think your /etc/fstab file is a bit wanky. could you post it? /dev/root is not a real partition, just a representation of the partition so you know where in the file to put it. /dev/root should be /dev/hda3.
 
I would bet that you forgot to change it all together. I believe the sample fstab has / /dev/ROOT, /boot /dev/BOOT, etc and like he said those need to be changed to the correct partitions
 
Thanks for the suggestions everyone, I will tackle this over the next few days when I get a few spare hours and post back with the results!
 
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