CentOS 5 server setup and tools

Since I was doing this, I thought might as well record the steps here ... if not for anybody else, just for me.

1. Switch from DHCP to static IP.
When I installed the box, I just breezed through the setup accepting a DHCP dynamic IP addressing scheme, with the idea that I will change this later. Well, since I don't do this for a living, I had to research a bit. This couple with the fact that the "UI" steps were different for the webserver (GUI method) box, and the TrixBox (TEXT-UI method) server. So, I found the steps that these UI's perform behind the scene's and simply did those steps (which were same for both servers). Thanks to information from this post ( ).

(( TBD ))

2. Installing webmin
If you do not know, Webmin (and its sister software, Usermin) are extremely useful sysadmin tools, that bring a lot of webadmin tasks into a browser. Now this is useful, especially for somebody like me, who does not do this on a regular basis. So, I always install webmin (and usermin) on any *nix box that I have to work on. Here are the steps for CentOS5 (thanks to http://matthewdarnell.blogspot.com/2007/10/installing-webmin-on-centos-5.html ).
2.1. yum -y install perl-Net-SSLeay
2.2. wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/webadmin/webmin-1.380-1.noarch.rpm
2.3. rpm -i webmin-1.380-1.noarch.rpm
2.4. https://:10000 on any browser to get to Webmin.

Of course, you need to make sure the higher number ports (like 10000) are not blocked by your ISP. (They seem to be in my case ... is there a good way to check. I know there is a website somewhere).

3. Creating a Xen Virtual OS.
Instead of creating "virtual apache domains", I decided to create multiple "virtual servers" on my server. We shall see how good this goes. Thanks to the posting here http://howtoforge.com/centos_5.0_xen for the info. I don't feel like repeating a lot of info here (maybe some day - which means never :-) ), but make sure you go through the "yum" steps on the page, to ensure you have the proper base for creating a virtual Xen.

One that is done - I was able to use the steps on this page - http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Xen/InstallingCentOSDomU - (and not the previous one) , to get the Xen VM going.