OK, lets say you've burned down the School of IT and you need to get Vislab back up and running from scratch. This Howto aims to give a brief outline of the steps to do this for the core servers.

Bringing up Hail

Hail is the central server at vislab, dealing with most of the user and machine-centric network tasks. It is a Debian Sarge machine. Assuming you've bought a robust machine with plenty of disk space to host it:

• Install Sarge from CD. CD images and documentation is available [http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/debian-installer/ here]. Suggestions on installation configuration:

  • The current partition layout looks like this:
  • {{{Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda2 957M 153M 805M 16% / /dev/sda5 3.8G 923M 2.9G 25% /usr /dev/sda6 3.8G 33M 3.7G 1% /usr/local/dev/sda7 3.8G 1.3G 2.5G 34% /var /dev/sda8 957M 39M 919M 4% /tmp /dev/sda9 3.8G 2.0G 1.8G 53% /mnt/scratch /dev/sda10 119G 95G 25G 80% /home}}}

• The current IP address is 129.78.157.20

• Setup network logins:
  • Install nis and nfs-kernel-server
    • Nis config is done during installation. You mainly need to know that the Vislab NIS domain is 'vislab2.vislab.usyd.edu.au'
    • You need to export the appropriate directories on the NFS server. This is done through /etc/exports. There current one is here: attachment:exports
• Install the applications. All of these are available in the standard Debian repository and can be installed with apt-get:
  • Postfix mail server
    • The current configuration: attachment:postfix-conf-20060828.tar.gz
  • Courier SSL IMAP server:
    • Currrent config: attachment:courier-conf-20060828.tar.gz
  • DNS server

    • This is currently 'tinydns', which is not in Debian for licensing reasons. However you could use any other DNS server. Regardless, the current config is here: tinydns-root-20060828.txt

  • DHCP server. Current config: dhcpd.conf

  • Jabber server. Currently we're using Jabberd2, but that's rapidly being abandoned by most sites, including jabber.org. Ejabberd is looking like the best of breed at the moment.
  • Optionally install Apache2 or some other web-server. This is only to allow access to user homepages under ~/public_html

Bringing up Venues

Venues is the main project web server for Vislab.

• Install Debian
• Install Apache2, mod_php and mod_python

• Install and configure MySql

• Install dnsmasq for DNS caching
• Install and configure NIS and NFS. See ["Installing Debian"] for details.

Setting up blogs and wiki

In practice the simplest way to recover the various sites is to recover the contents of /var/www from the backup system (see BackupNotes), but I'll go through the theoretical rebuild ...

• Install Wiki:

  • Download [http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/ MoinMoin]

  • Install under /var/www/vislab-wiki.
• Install Blogs:

  • Download [http://b2evolution.net/ B2Evolution]

  • Install under /var/www/vislab-blogs
• Install HPC wiki:

  • Download [http://www.mediawiki.org/ MediaWiki]

  • Install under /var/www/vislab-hpc
• All the other sites are static or no longer used. It is assumed you can get these from somewhere else.
• Setup the domain config for the various hosted sub-domains. See the existing config: attachment:venues-apache-conf-20060828.tar.gz