I reinstalled my linux server today and discovered that I no longer had a spare cd-rom laying around. I played with the idea of using my 32 gb usb stick, but it would definitely have taken too long to format, modify, backup original content on it, etc.

The point is that the only remaining alternative was to do a network install. At first I thought I would have to set up something with BOOTP so that I could boot from a remote server with the SUSE DVD mounted but luckily all that effort can be avoided. If you have a linux installation with grub on the drive already, it’s very easy to add a menu choice with a SUSE installation image on it and use the kernel arguments to give your machine a temporary IP address, the address of your gateway and then use that to connect to SUSE online and do the installation remotely from an installation there.

I have run Debian on it since 4 years back and it has served me well enough but administrating it can sometimes be quite a chore. At work, we run SUSE on our lab servers and administrating them with yast2 is quite simple, even handling virtual hosts in apache, virtual servers on xen and so on. The fact that anyone can write yast2-addons seems to have done a lot of good for it as a control panel.

I added the control panel for Apache among other things and it works very well, I could do almost all of my configuration from there and only had to add a single row to my apache2 configuration file.

I also discovered that there are now a lot of great alternatives to the not-updated-in-eight-years-ez-ipupdate for updating your dynamic DNS services. I picked one called ddclient, easy to configure and easy to use.

Only problem is that when you have so much material from the previous server it takes a long time to get back up and running with mysql, apache, php, backup scripts, network scripts, etc.

I was tired of the old format of the blog and decided to restart it so that I might write more interesting things here. Still deciding on what, however. Also posting under my real name now, rather than my alias. Also changed the language to english. Will be changing the theme to something more interesting in a bit.

Ps.  All the old posts are still in the archive, I just made them private since they’re not UTF-8 converted and also don’t want them visible.