for keeping track of my digital experiments

I was having trouble with some old CD-RW’s that I was installing Debian 5 from the other day, so since the machine’s BIOS supported booting from removable disk (usb), I decided on giving that a try.

Much of this is based on the great article – “Installing Debian Sarge
from a USB memory stick (USB key)“ - by Pascal Le Bail.

You are going to need a decent Internet connection that you can download the extra Debian packages from, and a BIOS that can boot from a usb disk. This assumes that your usb disk is the first that you have connected. Run dmesg to find out the exact dev name of your device if sda is incorrect.

fdisk /dev/sda
mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1
wget http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz
zcat boot.img.gz >/dev/sda1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
cp [netinstall or biz card].iso /mnt/


You can pick up a business card or netinstall cd iso from Installing Debian GNU/Linux via the Internet.

I have been searching for a way to visualize an OpenVPN setup for some time now. I need it to be virtual because of my lack of physical machines. I have had OpenVPN running before using Ethernet bridging, but without the adequate hardware, it is time to go virtual and use routing methods instead of bridging.

With a little bit of google searching I found “Adding openvpn support to openvz VPS” on biogeogen.com. The post in question gets you started, but leaves out a few pointers.

1) Don’t use the /etc/modules.conf file, just throw up modprobe tun inside of /etc/rc.d/rc.local. So the command will be executed each boot time. This is of course if after using lsmod | grep tun, you discover that tun support is not automatically loaded.
2) You need to have the virtual node off before running the following command on it: vzctl set 101 --capability net_admin:on --save. Where 101 is the VEID.
3) To execute commands on said virtual node with vzctl exec, you then need it to be started.

So the revised pastie:

lsmod | grep tun
[no output, then -->] modprobe tun
[stop the container]
vzctl set 101 --devices c:10:200:rw --save
vzctl set 101 --capability net_admin:on --save
[start the container]
vzctl exec 101 mkdir -p /dev/net
vzctl exec 101 mknod /dev/net/tun c 10 200
vzctl exec 101 chmod 600 /dev/net/tun

For setting up OpenVPN inside of the virtual node see: OpenVPN on Debian linux.

Prerequisites: clean Debian 5 installation (preferably from netinstall disc) on at least 1GHZ/512MB RAM, reliable Internet connection

I did the install over SSH, so that I don’t have to stand in front of my server rack. This experiment was conducted for a vmware server based virtual private server venture that I may be going in on with George Sawyer. He needed quickly deployable web environments for the classes he teaches.

Copy/Paste Code block

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` libx11-6 libx11-dev x-window-system-core x-window-system xspecs libxtst6 psmisc build-essential xinetd gcc-4.1 g++-4.1
ln -sf /usr/bin/gcc-4.1 /usr/bin/gcc
wget http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmserver/VMware-server-1.0.9-156507.tar.gz
tar xzvf VMware-server-1.0.9-156507.tar.gz
cd vmware-server-distrib/
./vmware-install.pl
[ !-- follow the instructions. the defaults should be just fine. --! ]
cd ..
wget http://vraidsys.com/software/vmware-update-2.6.26-5.5.7.tgz.gz
tar -xzvf vmware-update-2.6.26-5.5.7.tgz.gz
cd vmware-update-2.6.26-5.5.7
./runme.pl
[ !-- follow the instructions. the defaults should be just fine. --! ]
cd ..
rm -fdr /tmp/*
rm -fdr vmware*
rm -fdr VMware*
shutdown -r now


Edited July 30, 2009

Here is what just happened:
1) all the dependencies were installed first
2) then a system link was created so that the old version of gcc is used that is compatible with the kernel headers
3) the vmware server software is downloaded and installed.
4) you should reach a point in the installation where the process errors out installing the vmmon module.
5) use the patcher to override some dependency stuffs that can’t be fixed.
6) once the process is done, remove the installation files, and then restart the system to free up the memory used by the installation procedure.