Sunday, 23 March 2008

Ubuntu 6.06.1 on Dell SC440

The Dell SC440 has a Broadcom BCM5754 NIC, which isn't supported by the Ubuntu 6.06.1 server CD. You have to build the server without a network interface, then copy the new driver source onto it using a USB drive and build and install the driver.

I'm building Ubuntu on this server to run VMWare Server, so I also was particular about the disk partitioning. I created a 4 GB partition for root, then let it partition the rest itself. It made partition 5 the swap with 6.1 GB (I have 2 GB of RAM), and the rest of the disk on partition 2 (143.7 GB), which I put on /usr/local. I changed the usage of the file system to "largefile4" to give one inode for every 4 MB. I don't really know what that's going to do to performance, but it seems to make sense given that I'm going to be creating VMs there.

Next I followed the instructions here to build and install the driver. The instructions worked perfectly (with the usual 50 percent "forget to sudo" rate).

The I edited /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf to send the hostname:

send host-name "vmhost01";

And restarted the network:

ifdown eth0; ifup eth0

Then next time my DNS refreshed it got the server name.

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