New Installation - Server / FSTAB / Nvidia question(s)

[benny_fletch]

Lately I have been thinking about upgrading my desktop/server to a more recent version to utilize the benefits from newer software and over come some minor issues that have cropped up. A brief overview of my current setup and issues:

Mepis 11 using KDE 4.6.5 (from their community backport repo) and 3.2.0-0.bpo-3-686-pae kernel (from debian backports). This system has been mostly flawless, which makes it hard to want to move away from it, but... After starting to use to BPO kernel, from time to time it will not boot. After hard reseting (pushing the reset button on my box) one to five times it boots without issue (http://forum.mepiscommunity.org/view...kports#p301840). Another issue is I change out my old IDE DVD-RW for a new SATA DVD-RW and it has no longer acts the way it should. It works as in it mounts and operates CDs/DVDs correctly, but it will no longer rip my new CDs for digital backup (I am confident this will be resolved with a fresh install). On top of that, KDE 4.6.5 has worked well for me, but since using 4.9.2 on my kubuntu 12.04 install, 4.6.5 feels a bit archaic. Not that my system is the latest and greatest, but I just feel it could be better served with newer software.

Now to my questions (sorry for my rambling).

1) I use my desktop as a server as well (Apache & NFS). Are there other people doing the same and if so, what are your experiences? Has 12.04 been reliable in this role (i.e. uptime not an issue)?

2) FSTAB
My drive setup is this:
sda1 / 20GB
sda2 swap 2GB
sda3 /home 276GB
sdb1 /misc 600GB (for other data I don't keep in /home)

In the past I would simply create the folder misc on root post install and add the following line to fstab to get it to work:

/dev/sdb1 /misc ext3 auto,users,exec 0 3

On my laptop I see fstab works a bit different and I have no clue on how to add this drive/mount point. I am relatively clueless when it comes to the new GRUB and its use of UUID. Is this something the installer will prompt me for (which Mepis does not, for the installer does not handle extra drives at all)? What would be my course of action to add this drive to a new installation?

3) Are the proprietary Nvidia drivers pretty solid on 12.04? Has anyone had any major issues that I might need to be aware of? I am not that into eye candy, but I do need OpenGL compositing to work with issues and I do run the Total War series of games in crossover linux. Thus I will need the proprietary drivers vs. nouveau (I have heard it isn't quite there yet). Also, how difficult is it to install the Nvidia drivers? From what I have read it seems to be pretty simple, although I haven't done it before so any assistance would be appreciated.

Thanks for listening to my spiel.

[oshunluvr]

I have a dedicated home server that I recently updated to Ubuntu Server 12.04 (from 10.04). My server runs headless.

1. There are several good LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation walk-throughs on the net. It's a piece of cake. NFS is the newer v4 but you won't see much difference in setup - it's totally v3 compatible.

2. Your old fstab line(s) will work fine. The current ubuntu defaults to using UUIDs rather than device names, but the old /dev/sdX method still works.

3. My desktop currently runs 12.10, but when I had 12.04 on it I ran the xorg-edgers ppa to get the latest versions of xorg and the nvidia drivers and they ran perfectly.



You can either install Kubuntu and then add the necessary server packages or install the server .iso and add the KDE desktop. I doubt the results will be much different.

[benny_fletch]

Thank you for your reply.

1. There are several good LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation walk-throughs on the net. It's a piece of cake. NFS is the newer v4 but you won't see much difference in setup - it's totally v3 compatible.

I only really utilize Apache and PHP on my current server, but I will look into some of those walk-throughs since I want to expand my knowledge of SQL. I am going to try to set up my new NFS server with the new v4 method you pointed me to in another post. No sense on holding onto the past.

2. Your old fstab line(s) will work fine. The current ubuntu defaults to using UUIDs rather than device names, but the old /dev/sdX method still works.

Is there any sense on using the old syntax? I would rather use the new method in case one day the old way stops working. In my other forum it was suggested to use blkid to find my drives UUID and then add it into the fstab (at that point the syntax would be pretty much the same as I am used to).

3. My desktop currently runs 12.10, but when I had 12.04 on it I ran the xorg-edgers ppa to get the latest versions of xorg and the nvidia drivers and they ran perfectly.

In my Mepis install I am using the 304.51 version of Nvidia (via sgfxi) and xorg version 1.7.7, so I would assume 12.04's xorg version should be good enough. Unless there are issues with the stock xorg. The Nvidia utility in kubuntu, is it a pre-installed app or do I have to install something in Muon?

You can either install Kubuntu and then add the necessary server packages or install the server .iso and add the KDE desktop. I doubt the results will be much different.

I will probably install Kubuntu and then the server packages since I am more comfortable with this approach. Thanks again for the reply!

[oshunluvr]

Honestly, UUIDs make little difference vs. device names. If you are in the habit of re-formatting a filesystem often, UUIDs are a pain. I don't know of any plans to stop using device names because some devices don't use UUID's -like CD's. Basically, the UUID feature was created for multi-drive host systems. Since a unique UUID is created with each file system, you can be sure you're mounting the correct one even if the drives are re-arraigned. Like if drive 3 failed and you removed it, the drive device names would change - but not the UUID's. Bottom line is use which ever method works best for you.

BTW: Tip on using blkid. use sudo blkid -c /dev/null -o list to get a nicely formatted and up-to-date UUID list.

Re. nVidia: There was a noticeable difference using the xorg-edger's ppa with 12.04. You'll want to add it if you use 12.04. The driver is usually installed by default, but not activated until you do so using jockey.

Re. NFSv4. The only difference I see is to export/mount multiple filesystems, the v3 way required separate exports per filesystem. With v4 you use bind mounts on the server to combine the exports into a single mount and then export the combined mount. The benefit is on the client side you only have a single mount to deal with. If you're only exporting a single directory, there's no real advantage to v4. It's supposedly faster but in real-world I don't notice a difference.

[james147]

Note: in addition to the device file and UUID you can also refer to the disks by LABEL=file-system-label. As well as this you can refer to them using the device files in /dev/disks/by-uuid or /dev/disks/by-label but these are just the long winded way of using UUID or LABEL. (As a side note, /dev/disks/by-id looks interesting, I am not sure but to me it looks like a way to referring to a unique partition/disks independent of the filesystem that is on them, though I don't know for sure - UUIDs are stored in the file system so change when you format them).

The main advantage of UUIDs is that they are completely independent of disk order so if you remove a disk, or move a disk to a new system everything should continue to work as expected where as with device files it will likely fail unless you change the values manually. Also note that grub2 uses UUID's by default as well for the same reason but can also be configured to use device files if needed.

And the ability to mount with the device file will exists as long as the device files exists (and linux isn't going to drop them in a hurry ) so you should not need to worry about that.

Also,

sudo blkid -c /dev/null -o export

is a nice way of getting the data in a format that can easily be included in /etc/fstab (just delete the lines you dont need).

[dibl]

but... After starting to use to BPO kernel, from time to time it will not boot. After hard reseting (pushing the reset button on my box) one to five times it boots without issue

That issue may or may not be related to the kernel -- it should be easy enough to install some other kernel and see if the problem remains or disappears. If it remains, then it probably has to do with a hard drive. It could be as simple as a loose cable, but it could also be that the drive is deteriorating.

[benny_fletch]

That issue may or may not be related to the kernel -- it should be easy enough to install some other kernel and see if the problem remains or disappears. If it remains, then it probably has to do with a hard drive. It could be as simple as a loose cable, but it could also be that the drive is deteriorating.

It only happened with the Squeeze BPO kernels, if I switched back to the stock Mepis kernels everything was fine. I don't reboot or shutoff my desktop/server very often, so it wasn't an issue that hampered me too often. It is simply an issue I hoped would be resolved when I do a fresh install (which it was... next post).

[benny_fletch]

I did a fresh install of 12.04.1 on my desktop/server yesterday. The install went without a hitch. Upgraded to KDE 4.9.2 without issue as well. The only issue I ran into is that the GRUB menu would not show upon reboot, it was there and working, but it only showed the solid color background with no options. It eventually appeared after I fixed the nvidia boot splash issue discussed in this thread: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...ia+boot+splash , apparently one of the settings I messed with in /etc/default/grub resolved this. As for the questions I asked above.

1) Installed Apache, PHP, and NFS in Muon and their configurations were a breeze. I use Webmin for Apache. I ended up setting up NFS the old v3 way, since I am familiar with that method and it didn't appear that the new v4 way would do much for me expect for change how I like to export my shares, which I didn't want to do. EDIT - The only difference I found from what I did in the past was I referenced rpcbind instead of portmap in hosts.allow and host.deny.

2) The FSTAB question turned out to be mute since the installer allowed my to add the drive and assign it a mount point during installation. Many kudos to the installer! It saved having to do a bunch of extra steps post install.

3) Jockey initially crashed (which took half of KDE with it), but ran after installing all the post install updates (including the KDE 4.8.5 updates). It installed the 295.40 series of Nvidia drivers without issue. OpenGL and compositing are working as they should.

So far all is working great (although I haven't tested everything) and would like to take this moment to thank everyone involved in the development of Kubuntu, I have been extremely impressed with the ease, polish, and stability of 12.04! Thank you for your hard work, it is appreciated! Also, thanks to oshunluvr, james147, and dibl for taking the time to answer my questions.

EDIT - All my windows applications installed through crossover linux no longer work. Each one is throwing up a different error when I try to run them. I haven't had the time to do more troubleshooting, but the one positive is all of them are not working, meaning the issue may be with crossover linux or a similar global issue, which once fixed will allow everything to work again. When I find the culprit I'll let everyone know.