Installing a Gentoo server

[monk]

Hi! I am about to install Gentoo on one of my servers, but there is some issues i want to ask about before i start. Firt of all. I have a Pentium 166 Mhz processor. Is it right to edit make.conf like this then?:

# Pentium/Pentium MMX+ exclusive (requires a Pentium Classic or K6 or beyond)
CHOST="i586-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=i586 -O3 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="-march=i586 -O3 -pipe"

--
and since this will be a server i dont want X is it possible to set:
USE="-X" or something? what other flags should i use? what flags are you using on your servers (and desktops) and what hardware do you have?

Thanks
- Anders

[kirill]

Hi

I have a server running on similar hardware to yours. It's true that it's best to turn off xfree support for a server

first a couple of links:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=12876 - which USE flags to use
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=5717 - which optimisations to use

and here are mine (P166 MMX):

[stimpy]

I built some old Pentium 166's up last month - probably at a 1.2 equivalent tarball stage. (We bootstrapped from a toms rescue disk and then rsync'd from my other desktop installs. We had problems we the aged cdrom hardware and network booting - sigh)

At the time I decided that it was simpler to actually set up a server profile in the /usr/portages/profiles directory and start from a base of USE setting *I* wanted, instead of negating from the standard profile sets. It just appeared cleaner.

Then the differences between my servers was more obvious in the make.conf when one had different uses (and thus applications) than the other.

If you've got a pool of these servers I can recommend using the package building part of portage as you don't want to be waiting around compiling the same base components on each box all the time.

(Actually, to start off with we built one then did a raw disk copy across on to the other.... The only problem this seemed to have (apart from different partition sizes on the first attempt ) was that ssh doesn't work on one of the boxes.... there was a problem - still unresolved if you can help us - relating to the openpty stuff. "session_pty_req: session 0 alloc failed")

[SecMon]

The problem is with the way you backed up and restored the new system.
When doing this you tar'd the /dev and the devfs /dev filesystems. Now
the system has both running at the same mount point. I am having this
same issue and will post when I have figured a way to to remove or
rebuild the /dev and allow devfs /dev to manage it's items.

--- A few mins later ----

ok, the fix is easy.

1) boot the org system from cd / disk
a) mount your root to something
mkdir /mnt/root; mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/root;cd /mnt/root

2) tar -zcpvf dev.tgz dev
alt: (if you are in a bad way and have no access to the org system I have one here for you http://www.snlinc.com/gentoo/dev.tgz )

3) boot new system from cd / disk
a) mount your root to something
mkdir /mnt/root; mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/root;cd /mnt/root

4) mv dev dev.hosed

5) tar -zxpvf dev.tgz

-- unmount it and reboot... all the goo should be back in the correct
spots and you should have no more problems.

this will fix the
openpty stuff. "session_pty_req: session 0 alloc failed" issue
and loads of other things waiting in the wings

-- Keath