[sf-lug] the new colo box is now minimally built

[jim stockford]

    i don't know what happened, but i seem to have sat down
and built the new 1U box for the colo, at least with a very
minimum debian install.

    for the record, i had to get a boot image on a USB stick:
* get a 2GB USB stick and put it in my working fedora box
* identify its device name (/dev/sda in this particular case)
* get the usbstick.img.bz2 file, and thanks to michael paoli
* make a copy of the usbstick.img.bz2 file to protect from fat fingers
* use bunzip2 to unzip the file to usbstick.img
# bunzip2 usbstick.img.bz2
* use dd (rather than cat) to copy the file to the USB stick
    (i first did things the long way making an mbr and so on)
# dd -bs=1048576 if=usbstick.img of=/dev/sda

    then i had to use the USB stick to install debian on the new box:
* put the USB stick in a USB slot
* turn on the box
* hassle with BIOS so's to make the USB stick bootable
* boot the damn thing
* take forever to learn their character-based interface
* create /dev/sda1 for /boot (and devsdb1 for /boot/b)
* create 15GB RAID 1 md0 for /
* make a 2G swap partition
* make 120GB RAID 1 md1 for LVM
* set up separate LVM volumes for /usr/local/, /var/log/, /var/spool/,
/var/www/, /var/www/wiki/, /home/, /tmp/, /xfer (for transfers in and 
out),
and maybe one or two other mount points, i forget just now.

    then i had to boot it up. hey, it works!

    Now i gotta have help setting things up on this very
minimum box (doesn't even have sshd on it anywhere).
* what system utilities and standard daemons should go
on it (sshd, DNS, nagios, osiris, nmap...)?
* what applications should go on it (postfix, docuwiki,
apache + mods, CVS or subversion, python, perl...)?
* how to get our config and data files transferred over?

    got ideas, suggestions? note this box will replace the tower
we're currently running at the colo and will serve at least
sf-lug and balug web sites and mail and other related.
    this box can be a partner box for Hayes Valley Learning
Center and other community services (to perform monitoring
and provide redundant copies of critical HVLC server files).
    i, jim, plan to put a box in the sfccp colo facility that can be
a monitoring and backup partner for the above mentioned,
just-built colo box.