OPS235 Lab 2 - Fedora17

OPS235 Lab 2 GNU/Linux Installation - Fedora 12

Objectives

1. To perform a GNU/Linux installation using the Fedora 12 distribution
2. To perform boot time customization and configuration
3. To obtain network configuration from a DHCP server
4. To secure the boot loader by adding password protection
5. To investigate GRUB boot loader configuration

Reference

• man pages
  • mount
  • rpm
  • hostname
  • uname
  • ps
  • ifconfig
  • netstat
  • route
  • nslookup
  • wc
  • grub

• Resources on the web
  • Fedora Release Notes
  • Fedora Installation Guide
  • Protecting Grub
  • Grub Details and Sample Config
  • One-way Hash Function
  • GRUB Tutorial
  • Password Security

Required Material

• Fedora 12 x_64 Installation DVD - You can burn this onto a DVD-R in the Open Lab
• SATA Hard Disk (the same one used for Lab 1)
• USB Memory Stick (minimum 64M)

Prerequisite

• Completion of Lab 1

Introduction

In this lab, you are going to install the Fedora (GNU/Linux Distribution) to your hard disk from DVD.

You need a number of hard disk partitions/physical volumes for this installation: the /dev/sda1 (300M), the /dev/sda2 extended partition, the /dev/sda5 (300M), all created in Lab 1, and 4 new physical volumes which you will create during this lab.

After the installation, you will collect baseline information about your Fedora GNU/Linux system, do some post installation configuration to prepare your system for the remainder of the labs, manipulate the GRUB configuration, and start using the system.

Instructions

1. Insert and secure your SATA hard disk to the removable disk slot.
2. Power up the computer.
3. Insert the Fedora 12 x_64 Installation DVD into the DVD drive.
4. Reboot the system.

Investigation 1: How do you install Fedora?

Please take note!
Fedora uses a type of partition management called Logical Volume Management (LVM). In LVM, disk partitions are called Physical Volumes (PVs) and provide storage to a Volume Group (VG). This storage is then split into various Logical Volumes (LVs). The advantage to this scheme is that you can change LV size and you can add and remove PVs after installation. For example, you can add a new disk to your system and then increase the size of your existing filesystems using that extra disk space. Please be careful to enter all LVM information accurately, including the VG and LV names. We will investigate and manipulate LVM in future labs.

At the Welcome Screen choose "Install or upgrade an existing system" to launch the Graphical installation program and select the following options (you can use the media test to verify that your DVD burned correctly; --It will take some time-- otherwise, skip it):

1. Language - English
2. Keyboard Configuration - U.S. English
3. Set your hostname to - f12host (one word, no space, all lowercase)
4. Set your timezone to - America/Toronto and check that your system time is correct
5. Root Password: enter a password of your own choosing. Pick one that is really, really hard to guess to protect your system. (Recommendation: use the first letter and all the punctuation from a favorite phrase or song verse. For example, "To be or not to be, that is the question!" could become the password "Tbontb,titq!").
6. Disk Partition Setup - Specify a Custom Layout, and then set up the installation with this configuration:
   • Find your existing 300MB partition (/dev/sda1). Edit this entry so that the mountpoint is /boot and is formatted as an ext3 filesystem.
   • Don't touch the other existing 300M partition (/dev/sda5).
   • Create 4 new partitions that are 20% of the remaining space on your disk (minimum 15000 MB) in size. Set the File System Type to Physical Volume (LVM). Should be /dev/sda6 to /dev/sda9.
   • Use the LVM button to create a Volume Group. Set the Volume Group Name to vg_main and set the Physical Extent size to 4MB.
   • Click on the Add button to create a logical volume within that volume group:
     • Mount point / (root), filesystem type ext4, logical volume name root, size 50GB (50000MB).
7. Say yes to continue without a swap partition.
8. Say yes to format /dev/sda1.
9. Accept Boot Loader defaults.
10. Accept Office and Productivity and repository defaults.

Please take note!
The installation process will take about 15 minutes to complete on the P4 CPU system when using DVD. Click the Reboot button on the screen to reboot the system after the installation is complete. There is a post installation setup after boot.

1. Reboot
2. Check the License Agreement. What license is used for the Fedora distribution? What activities do have restrictions and obligations?
3. Create a user account for yourself using the same name as your learn account.
4. Set date and time. Normally, you would want to enable Network Time Protocol, but since we will be experimenting with the networking turned off in later labs, leave it disabled.
5. Click on Do Not Send Hardware Profile.
6. Finish the post-installation customization, wait for the login screen to appear, and then login to your Learn account.

Answer the Investigation 1 question in your lab log book.

Investigation 2: How many files packages and files are installed on the system?

For the rest of the tasks in this lab, you must login to your system using your Learn account and execute all commands under your learn account. If you get a Permission Denied message when trying to execute a command, then switch to the superuser account by running the command su - and type in the password for "root". Once the intended command is executed, type "exit" to exit from the superuser account and return to your regular Learn account.

Record the commands used and the output generated in each of the following steps:

1. To find all the mount points, enter the command: mount
   • Study the output and record all the mount points in your log book.
2. The name of the installation log file is /root/install.log -- It is an ASCII file (how can you be sure?) and can be viewed with the less command.
3. You can make use of this file to determine how many packages have been installed: complete the following command to count the number of packages listed in the installation log file:
   • grep ________________ /root/install.log | wc -l
4. Using the rpm command: you can also use the following commands to list all the installed packages, and the total number of packages installed:
   • rpm -q -a
   • rpm -q -a | wc -l
   • rpm -qa | wc -l
5. The -q option means query, and the -a option means all (in other words, query all installed software packages). Did you get the same number of packages from the above two methods?
6. Some of the files on your system were installed with the software packages, and some were created by system activity (for example, by creating your Learn account and by logging in). If you know the package name (from the install.log), you can list all the files that were installed from the package by using the following command:
   • rpm -q -l package_name
7. This combines the -q (query) option with the -l (list filenames) option.
8. You can pipe the outupt through wc -l to count the number of lines:
   • rpm -ql package_name| wc -l
9. Using what you learned in steps 3 and 4, get a count of the total number of files installed by all of the software packages on your system.
10. To find out the name that you have assigned to your Linux system, enter the command: hostname
11. To find out the kernel version of your GNU/Linux workstation and the date it was created, enter the command: uname -r
12. To find out all the system processes running on your GNU/Linux workstation, enter the command: ps -ef
13. To capture the list of all the system processes to a file called ps.lst, enter the command: ps -ef > ps.lst
14. Copy the installation log file /root/install.log and the file ps.lst to a USB memory key, or scp to your matrix account as a backup.

Updating Fedora
You need to complete a system update. Start the Firefox web browser, turn off popup window blocking (select Edit>Preferences, then select the Content tab and uncheck the box to Block Popups), then login to SeneNET. Open a terminal and su - to start a shell as root. Enter the command yum update This will download and install all of the packages that have been updated since the installation DVD image was created. If you complete this command at Seneca it should run quite fast as Seneca College hosts a Fedora Repository mirror.