Ten Easy Steps to SLES 9 Installation

SUSE LINUX products are among the most easily installed Linux distributions available. After you have done your upfront planning homework, as discussed earlier in this chapter, you can complete the actual installation of your first SLES 9 server in less than an hour (subject to the speed of your hardware and installation method chosen) using the 10 simple steps discussed in the following sections.

NOTE

YaST performs all the configuration and installation work. It works by collecting all the necessary information from you and building a to-do list without actually touching anything on your system until you click Accept at the last installation dialog box. Given this, if you change your mind halfway through, you can easily abort the installation process and start all over again.

Selecting an Installation Method

When you boot your machine either using CD1 or the boot diskettes, a welcome splash screen is displayed. You are then presented with the boot menu, as shown in Figure 1.4.

Figure 1.4. SLES 9 boot menu.

If you don't select an option within 20 seconds, the first entry in the menu (Boot from Hard Disk) is automatically selected, and this is not what you want during an installation. Press the Tab key once to cancel the countdown.

At this screen, use the F2 key to change the screen resolution. Typically, 800x600 works well, but some people prefer 1024x768; any higher resolution would make the text displayed during installation difficult to read. If you are to perform a network-based installation, use F3 to select the desired network protocol, and you will be prompted to enter the necessary information, such as the IP address/DNS name of the source server and so on.

TIP

If the graphics screen does not display correctly, select Text mode for the installation. This does not impact the use of your GUI desktop at a later time. As a matter of fact, if you are installing SLES 9 under VMWare Workstation 4.x or 5.x or VMWare ESX Server 2.x (www.vmware.com), you must use Text mode.

Use the arrow key to highlight Installation and press Enter. You are required to accept the Novell Software Licensing Agreement by clicking on I Agree before you can continue.

Selecting the Language

After you accept the license agreement, the graphical installation tool, YaST, runs. Select your preferred language from the list that appears on the screen, as shown in Figure 1.5, and then click Accept to continue.

Figure 1.5. Selecting your language.

Choosing Installation Settings

YasT probes and analyzes your system hardware, makes some automatic installation decisions, and displays them on the following screen (see Figure 1.6). You can change each choice by clicking the Change button and selecting the item you want to modify. For example, to change the software selections, click Change and select Software from the menu.

Figure 1.6. Installation Settings screen.

From the Software Selection screen (see Figure 1.7), you can change the system type that governs what packages are to be installed. The Default system is suitable in many cases, but it tends to also include software that you don't necessarily run. Instead, select Minimum System or Minimum Graphical System and then click on Detailed Selection to select the specific packages you want to run on this server. (You did create a list of packages as suggested in the earlier "Pre-Installation Planning" section, didn't you?)

Figure 1.7. Software Selection screen.

For this step, the following settings generally need changing or customizing:

Software selections
Time zone setting

Seasoned users would generally want to change the hard disk partitioning schemes to better suit their needs. They would also change the selection of filesystem type and whether encryption is to be enabled.

Click Accept after all desired changes are made and to continue to the next step.

WARNING

This is the last step in the setup process before your system is modified. After clicking Accept, you are asked to confirm that you want to go ahead with the installation using the data collected. After you click Yes, Install, your hard drives will be partitioned and formatted, which means no turning back.

Preparing the Hard Disks

After you click Yes, Install, YaST partitions and formats the hard disks. Subsequently, the installation of the system and the software packages begins. During the installation, information about the package that is currently being installed is displayed, along with time-remaining estimates (see Figure 1.8). You will be prompted to change the CD if necessary.

Figure 1.8. Software package installation progress screen.

Following the installation of the base system and the application software packages, the bootloader (GRUB or LILO, depending on what you selected in the previous step) is installed, and then the system restarts.

Configuring the System

After the basic system has been installed and restarted using the kernel installed on your hard disk (instead of the one off the boot disk), you can configure some system settings. The first thing you need to do is to set a password for the root user that should be at least six characters in length.

CAUTION

Because the root user has full access to everything on the server, his or her password must not be easily guessed. Follow the strong-password guidelines outlined in Chapter 4.

Before clicking Next and proceeding to configure network settings, you may want to change the way passwords are hashed on this server. To do so, click Expert Options and select the desired hashing method, as shown in Figure 1.9. (DES is the default and the weakest method, and Blowfish is the strongest.)

Figure 1.9. Changing password hashing algorithm.

Specifying Network Settings

The next step is to configure your network connectivity. YaST will probe for and auto-detect network cards, modems, ISDN cards, and DSL devices (see Figure 1.10). In most cases, unless you use DHCP to assign a server's network information, the network card configuration would need to be modified.

Figure 1.10. Network Configuration screen.

Click Change and select Network Interfaces. Next, select the card you want to modify and click its Change button. Finally, highlight the network card and click Edit. By default, YaST sets up the network card for DHCP, but you may want to use statically assigned values instead:

To use a static IP address, change the setup method and enter the server's IP address and netmask (see Figure 1.11).
Figure 1.11. Network Address Setup screen.
When not using DHCP, you need to configure a hostname and DNS server information for the server. Click Host Name and Name Server to make the changes; the default hostname is linux and its default domain name is site.
Click Routing and enter the IP address of your nearest router in the Default Gateway field.

During this step, you can also enable the VNC Remote Administration option.

Applying Online Updates

If you have an Internet connection, you can test the network configuration made in the preceding step and update your system with the online update service. The connection-to-Internet test is performed by attempting to download the SLES release note from SUSE. The success of the Internet connectivity test operation provides confirmation of your correctly configured network card(s).

Configuring Services

The Service Configuration step allows you to configure two services: Certificate Authority (CA) Management and LDAP services (see Figure 1.12). CA management can create a default CA and certificate that can later be used with services, such as Apache, to provide secure connections between the server and its clients. The LDAP service setup creates an LDAP database so you can support LDAP-enabled applications on this server. If you chose not to include the LDAP server during software selection earlier, its setup will not be performed during this step.

Figure 1.12. Configuring CA management and LDAP.

If you choose not to set up these services at this time, you can easily do so later using YaST. Any other services you have selected (such as mySQL) will need to be set up later using YaST or their specific configuration tools.

Configuring User Information

The next step allows you to configure some user-related settings. First, you need to select how a user to your server will be authenticated: via an NIS server, an LDAP server, or using locally stored /etc/passwd information (see Figure 1.13). The default selection is LDAP. If you don't have an NIS or LDAP server on your network or if the users for this server are to be locally managed, select Local as the authentication method; this setting can be easily changed later using YaST.

Figure 1.13. Selecting a user authentication method.

If you choose NIS or LDAP as the user authentication method, a screen to set up the client is displayed next. Figure 1.14 shows the LDAP client configuration screen.

Figure 1.14. LDAP client configuration.

The next screen (see Figure 1.15) asks you to create a new local user (that is, the information will be stored in /etc/passwd even though you may have set up NIS as the user authentication method). If you want to create more than one new user at this point, click User Management instead. You can simply click Next and not create a nexnew user for the time being but create users later.

Figure 1.15. Adding a new local user.

TIP

You should always create a local user for yourself. That way, instead of logging on as root at all times, you can log in as this nonprivileged user and switch your identity to root (using su or sudo; see Chapter 5, "User Environment Management and Security") only when necessary.

YaST then updates some configuration files, performs some cleanup, and displays the release note for yournex information.

Configuring Hardware

Finally, YaST performs a hardware probe for graphics cards, monitor, printers, sound, and so on. You can simply accept the results of this check by clicking Next. The next screen (see Figure 1.16) shows that the installation is complete and the server is ready for use.

Figure 1.16. Installation completed.

If you have additional hardware to configure or want to jump right into configuring some services, check the Start YaST Control Center check box before clicking Finish.