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PostPosted: Thu Jun 01, 2017 3:32 am 
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Hi !!!!
Is anywhere step by step guideline for installing Ubuntu (or something like this) on EX495 without display and keyboard ?


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PostPosted: Thu Jun 01, 2017 7:27 am 
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Congrats on the first post for June 2017!!!
I did a quick search of the site and found this, there may be others newer. I just searched Installing Ubuntu and came up with this older link:
https://dagolav.prestegarden.com/post/instaling-ubuntu-on-the-hp-mediasmart-ex490/

Good Luck and if you find something that works for you, please share, it may help others.

Edit: I have heard of some of the NAS version of Linux that run off a USB stick and they can use all 4 bays for harddrives, that to me would be cool.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 20, 2017 3:30 pm 
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Apologies for the necro, hopefully someone will find something useful in this reply.

My significant other found an ex490 with trays sans drives for $12.64 at a local Salvation Army thrift store and bought it for me as a novelty. I've since migrated my primary Ubuntu server to that chassis. Here are some observations. I don't use Ubuntu GUIs very often, preferring the shell and various web administrative front ends, so this process weights towards the command line.

I started out with a fresh install of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I did not have a KVM dongle, so my method for installing 16.04 was to use another conventional workstation to install 16.04 and get it up to date. I then modified /etc/network/interfaces to include an entry for enp3s0, the Realtek driver that 16.04 uses for the 490/495(the 485 uses enp2s0, fwiw). I also enabled remote ssh access via apt-get install openssh server. I then shut down, pulled the drive and dropped it in the 490.

After a minute or so my router showed an internal address granted to the 490, and I was able to ssh in and complete the configuration. There really wasn't much more to it than that, but it did take me a long time to figure out what to put in \etc\network\interfaces to get the 490 to properly initialize the network. I had to use a USB ethernet dongle as a common port between the staging workstation and the 490 so I could get the dmesg output and divine what to use in the interfaces file. I hope someone can leverage my wasted time and just go straight to enp3s0!

Sadly, after all that I could not use 16.04 as my main box, as I run a small FreePBX install, and there are some apache/php incompatibilities between FreePBX and 16.04. So I decided to just stick with 14.04.5 LTS, built from a compressed image of my original home server. I set up an 8Tb disk with a 1M bios_grub partition, a 60Gb system partition, 2Gb swap and the rest for later use as a stripe. I dropped it in an existing Ubuntu system where the disk was read as /dev/sdb, then applied the image via dd if=source.img of=/dev/sdb2. I did a check of the partition afterwards with e2fsck -fy /dev/sdb2, then expanded the filesystem with resize2fs /dev/sdb2. My /boot partition wasn't mounted elsewhere, so I had everything I needed on /dev/sdb2 to get it to stand on its own.

The UUID for /dev/sdb2 was now the UUID from the image, so I generated a new one with uuidgen and then applied it with tune2fs /dev/sdb2 -U <uuid>. I collected all of the current UUIDs in the system with blkid, then I mounted /dev/sdb2 as /mnt/clone and outfitted /mnt/clone/etc/fstab with the proper UUID's for sdb's primary and swap partitions. While I was in /etc, I modified /network/interfaces with the correct eth* details. My install of 14.04 still used the eth* naming convention rather than the driver-specific convention in 16.04, so I just incremented the last eth in the file, anticipating that the boot process would read a new eth0 and re-map it to the next unused device. I'd cycled quite a few adapters through my original box, so the one i finally landed on was eth7.

The last step was to set up grub. I prepped the chroot process with

mount --bind /dev /mnt/clone/dev
mount --bind /sys /mnt/clone/sys
mount --bind /proc /mnt/clone/proc


then did a chroot /mnt/clone. After that, grub-install /dev/sdb followed by update-grub got everything in place. I exited the chroot, unmounted the three drives above, unmounted /mnt/clone, did a hdparm -Y /dev/sdb and removed the disk. The install booted in the 490 after that.

Unfortunately, the first thing it told me was that asterisk routinely hit an illegal instruction when it tried to start. I don't know why, but it didn't like the Celeron in the 490. Luckily, my previous system used a Q9550S, so I pulled that and a 4Gb DDR2 module and dropped them in the 490. Things were back on track after that.

The last step for my setup was to get the primary data array online. I have around 11Tb of home movies that I serve up via Plex, and those files are kept backed up via rsync to other locations(now other ex485's/90's!), so I can use non-redundant arrays without worrying that I'm going to lose data. I loaded up the other three 8Tb drives that would make the array, which showed up as sdb, sdc and sdd. I had the partition layout I wanted for all of the disks still on /dev/sda, so I ran parted to do an align-check on partition 4(optimal), then backed up the partition table on sda with sgdisk --backup=table /dev/sda, and then wrote it to the other disks with the format sgdisk --load-backup=table /dev/sdb. The fourth partition on each disk was now set for my stripe. I created it with mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=0 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sd[abcd]4. I formatted the array with mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0, then mounted it as /mnt/stripe before starting my long 11Tb rsync to populate it.

I find that having the partitions set up this way allows for a lot of flexibility in regards to booting various different instances of Ubuntu. Using the same simple imaging piece above, I can blast a 16.04 image to sdc2, then swap disks 1 and 3 to boot 16.04 and still have access to md0. Someone slicker with grub could probably tell you how to reboot with a command to tell the first disk to look to the third disk for booting, but pulling the disks is easy enough that I'm not inclined to dig into it. I have cron jobs set up to image sda2 to a big file on /mnt/stripe, then write them out to /dev/sdd2 and modify the grub and fstab information accordingly. If my primary disk collapses and takes down the raid with it, I just swap disk 4 to the first bay, boot back up, get another disk and rebuild the array. I also have this nice four-bay external SATA array that can offer up the transplanted 490 disks to another host, where the stripe is typically recognized right away. On a modern system that usually means 300MB rebuild transfers rather than 100MB over GigE.


Last edited by philander on Tue Jun 20, 2017 4:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Gardian
PostPosted: Tue Jun 20, 2017 3:57 pm 
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Very Cool. Thx! This will probably help someone that knows there Distros :-)
I wish I would have started back in the DOS days to learn them....

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[X510 CPU/RAM/All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's]
[X510 /2 in box]
[X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External]
:twisted: Fear the Cloud :twisted:


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