MikeTeo.net

My home gateway machine is a 5-year old Intel P4 2.4GHz machine running FC8. This machine has undergone a few Fedora upgrades from FC5 to FC7 and then to FC8. The hard disks have been replaced 3 times, and the partitions have been messed up because the hard disk replacements are often larger in capacity than the burn outs.

The upgrade this time is a clean installation of Fedora Core 9 with a couple of new hardware–a new LG DVD superwriter, Adaptec 1420SA SATA-II RAID controller and 2 x WD Caviar SE16 640GB hard disks. There were minor glitches during the installation, but they were resolved through the abundant information available on the Internet.

Adaptec 1420SA and Adaptec 1210SA

My motherboard has been using an Adaptec 1210SA 2-port SATA controller with a pair of WD 72GB hard drives on linux RAID-1. I have intended to keep this pair of HDD connected to the 1210SA card, and to connect the DVD drive and the 2 x Caviar HDD to the 1420SA.

The Adaptec 1420SA is a 4-ports, PCI-X 133 MHz, low-profile form factor SATA-II controller. Although Adaptec advertises this card as capable of RAID 0/1, this is a software-RAID card which requires special drivers for the RAID feature. I have bought this card primarily to use it a SATA-II controller for the WD hard disks, so I am not very much concerned with the so-called Adaptec HostRAID feature. Furthermore, this is one of the cheapest SATA-II card which is backward compatible to be slotted into a PCI 2.2 slot; my old motherboard does not have any PCI-X slots.

After slotting in the 1420SA, my motherboard was able to detect both SATA controllers with all the 4 hard drives and the LG DVD drive. However, the motherboard was unable to boot from the DVD drive which was connected to the 1420SA. After fiddling around with the cables and trying out various combinations, I had to connect the DVD drive and one WD 72GB hard drive to the 1210SA, and the other WD 72GB and the two WD 640GB hard drives to the 1420SA. Now the machine could boot from the FC 9 DVD.

Fedora Core 9 Installation

The FC9 installation was straight-forward, not much different from FC8. Anaconda was able to detect the pair of the WD 640GB hard drives connected to the 1420SA. I have created ext3 and swap RAID-1 partitions on the WD 72GB hard drives, and a big 640GB xfs LVM on RAID-1 partitions on the WD 640GB hard drives. Software package installation proceeded smoothly, and the system reboot after the installation was completed.

Grub Failure

The machine failed to boot up after the installation. Only “GRUB” was shown on the screen and the machine hung. Apparently, the installer didn’t setup the bootloader properly on the WD 72GB drives. I followed the instructions here to re-install grub on the hard drives, and was able to see the kernel and initrd loading.

rhgb Issue

The machine was booting happily into initd when it hung again somewhere after the partitions were mounted. I had this issue with my previous FC8 installation. The trick is to disable the redhat graphical boot. So reboot the machine in rescue mode, and then remove rhgb parameter in this file: /boot/grub/menu.lst. There is no need to re-install grub for this. Reboot again, and the machine boot happily into the graphical firstboot to prompt for some more information to configure the clock/timezone and the first user account on the machine.

Daemontools

The sysV init in FC9 will only look for the default runlevel. All other configurations will be ignored. This causes problem as I’d always been using daemontools to manage some of my software services as well as dnscache. Nonetheless, I decided to try out this software called runit. Runit is very similar to daemontools, except that it also supports custom runlevels and service dependencies. After installing runit, I configured it to run on bootup by adding this line /sbin/runsvdir-start & to /etc/rc.d/rc.local. I believe daemontools can be started in this manner by adding /command/svscanboot & to /etc/rc.d/rc.local.

FireFox

If your internet interface is on DHCP, you may find that starting FireFox will give you an offline error. I have followed the instructions here to eliminate this annoying problem.

Conclusion

So far, I have been pleased with FC9. The feel is almost similar to FC8 with better support for multi-lingual input through SCIM. I have not encountered any hair-pulling problems yet (finger-crossed), so I guess this distro should be enough to last me until the next fedora release.

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