choose a distro&rev

[Toomas Tamm]

On Tue, 2013-03-19 at 21:21 -0400, George VerDuin wrote:
> This "blank screen abort" has to be a weary topic by now.
> I'm sorry, but I found a new way.
> 
> A couple weeks ago I thought T Neumann had the best idea with the 
> walkthough he posted.
> So I bought a pre-owned 3-yr-old 1U / 4-core / 64-bit opteron / 2-HD 
> just to follow the doc exactly.
> With Debian rev 6.0.7 booting from CD, the install ended with "Polling 
> Network hardware"(sic).

We have used virtual machines for trying out new things (including new
versions of operating systems) with great success. In fact, all our
current intranet infrastructure (FAI, local mirrors, DCHP, DNS, LDAP,
etc) runs from an array of virtual machines, distributed between two
physical computers. This makes it easier to upgrade any service one by
one, without major interruptions and without need for a separate box for
every experiment.

The underlying OS on the physical hardware is Debian squeeze, with 3.2
kernel from wheezy and KVM 1.0 from backports. I guess you can use any
reasonably modern distribution and virtualization scheme since very
little needs to be installed beyond a basic system and the virualization
software.

Setting up the virtual networking in the underlying machine may be a bit
complicated if you have not done this before and need to run things
like, eg, DHCP from the VM. However, once this is mastered, quite
amazing things become possible, such as different VMs on different
subnets, VMs with multiple (virtual) net cards, all running on a
physical computer with a single Ethernet cable connected to a smart
switch.

Regards,

Toomas Tamm