Hello!
Today I did a fresh network install of current cooker on a computer for
someone who doesn't yet know much about Linux. But that's gonna change, I
can warrant that :_)
Anyway, here are some notices I wanted to share. I know that this is too
late for 7.2, but well, I guess it's early enough for the next release,
isn't it? :-)
- Basically everthing worked very well. My congrats to the team.
- The localization/i18n should be worked on more. Quite some packages don't
have German descriptions and there were some small glitches where there were
still some english text. But nothing too bad though.
- I've choosen expert install. In expert mode, reiserfs should be used when
selecting auto partitioning.
- ISDN installation did not work well with a Creatix ISA PNP card. I've
manually choosen this card after the install program told me that it didn't
find any PCI isdn cards. Fair. BUT: It did not insert the correct line for
the module in /etc/isdn/profile/card/mycard. There needs to be:
I4L_MODULE="hisax" (for my card)
but there was:
I4L_MODULE=""
This should be worked on. Further, in /etc/init.d/network there's this
line:
interfaces=`ls ifcfg* | egrep -v '(ifcfg-lo|:)' | \
egrep -v 'ifcfg-ippp[0-9]+$' | \
egrep 'ifcfg-[a-z0-9]+$' | \
sed 's/^ifcfg-//g'`
This filters out any ifcfg-ippp files. Why is that? With this in
/etc/init.d/network, no ISDN interfaces will be set up. After I removed the
second line (-v ifcfg-ippp), ISDN interfaces came up well.
He uses a PNP card. This should be checked, and pnpdump should be run. Had
to do this manually and enable the correct lines. There sould be some
interface to have this automated, also because if you make changes in
/etc/isapnp.conf you have to make sure that those changes are also present
in /etc/isdn/profile/card/mycard. Specifically, if you change the IO ports
and IRQ in one file, this has to go to the other as well. I know that, but
a newbie surely does not.
Then, he wanted to have his setup to do dial-on-demand; ie. whenever
something from the inet is wanted, an internet connection should be
established. To do this, I set the default route to the IP of the ISDN
interface. But this is not enough. When the connection comes up, the
default route has to be deleted and reset to the newly assigned IP address
(note: he's not using static IP's. Static IPs are a very uncommon feature
here in Germany). Now when the connection goes down, you'll need to delete
the default route again and reset it to the one specified in
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ippp0.
After about an hour of my time, or 1 month of his time (at least), I got
everything going.
- Mail setup is not perfect. I had to do some manual tweaks to
/etc/postfix/main.cf to make it use a relay. That is, I inserted
smtprelay = some.smtp.host
defer_transports = smtp
And I also edited the ``mydestination = ...'' line to make it work.
It would be nice if there were some tool to automate this. Maybe this
should include configuration of fetchmail as well. The user should be asked
from where he receives email, and what his "outgoing" smtp server is. Now
that there's an /etc/init.d/fetchmail to have fetchmail go to daemon mode
and periodically check for mail, it would be very nice to have a
postfix-daemon mode; ie. make postfix send out its mail queue every so
often. I accomplished that by inserting "*/11 * * * * /usr/sbin/sendmail -q"
into roots crontab.
-------------------------
Conclusion: He was really surprised how well behaved installation was. So
was I. I made sure to use as many GUI tools as are available. I'm really
amazed about how much you can configure by those tools. I really like it!
PS: I CC'd this to [EMAIL PROTECTED] as he's the Mandrake maintainer
of the isdn4k-utils and isdn4net packages because of my hassle with the ISDN
setup. I also included [EMAIL PROTECTED] in the CC line as those
troubles were install related. Pardon me if these CC's were wrong, but I
wanted to make sure that I'm heard.
PPS: If you've got this message like 3 or 4 times, I'd like to apologize.
Everytime I tried to send out this message, I got an error message saying
that this (was cooker meant?) is only a Mandrakesoft internal mailinglist.
Alexander Skwar
--
Homepage: http://www.digitalprojects.com | http://www.dp.ath.cx
Sichere Mail? Mail an [EMAIL PROTECTED] fuer GnuPG Keys
ICQ: 7328191
