Bootstrapping Grumpy

The 300GB Maxtor disk in Grumpy is giving me grief. Has trouble booting, very slow performance. Most certainly a case for the warranty department.
I'm concerned Grumpy won't boot anymore when I cycle power, and I certainly don't feel like loosing my MythTV recordings...

I'm re-building Grumpy from the ground up on a new harddrive. I hope my notes from the last year in this blog will be useful.

I started out with the Debian netboot install. Sarge netboot.tar.gz unpacked into chef:/tftpboot, add new host entry in gw:/etc/dhcpd.conf with next-server 192.168.200.10. Works like a charm. In order to get a picture after booting on this VIA M10000 board, I need to pass the vga option to the kernel.

I want to leave the option open of adding another hard drive later and build a RAID1 from the video and movie files. In the Debian installer I manually reconfigured the partitions to use (ext3, swap, RAID), then configured RAID1 with only one member partition. I'm not using LVM here, this is a very straightforward setup. The large partition will be used for video and movie files, the root partition will hold everything else.

And again, I'm impressed by the ease of this network-based installation. Debian rocks.

First thing after the installation and completing base-config, I switch APT's sources to testing, so that I get a recent kernel (in this case I'm going to 2.6.18-3).

surprise: A base Debian install has no ssh...

On to rescuing media files... oha, I forgot how much data 300GB is. This will take a while.