Ubuntu Server 9.10 Server Install Details

The student machines in this workshop will be running Ubuntu Server version 9.10 (Karmic Koala) with the Ubuntu Desktop meta-package installed as well as the !OpenSSH Server install. Here are the installation details:

• Boot from Ubuntu Server 9.10 CD (i386 version for P4 boxes).
  • You can obtain an ISO image from ​http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-server-i386.iso, or you can obtain the torrent file for this version from ​http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-server-i386.iso.torrent.
• We install using defaults:
  • Default paritioning scheme
  • File system with LVM
  • non-encrypted home directory
  • etc.
• Specific items (non-default) that are required include:
  • Select proper keyboard
  • Select proper country for time zone and Ubuntu mirrors (Guatemala)
  • Choose to manually configure network addresses for each PC
  • Manually configure IP address, gateway, etc.
  • For machine name use "pc1" through "pc18"
  • For domain name use "aroc"
  • For initial user use "tldadmin" - choose a local password, but make it the same on each student machine.
  • At the very end of the install select to install the OpenSSH Server package

Post Installation Configuration

These are the steps that will take place post-install:

• Select a machine to be the NOC server for the classroom.
• If this machine has already been selected, name this machine "noc.aroc"
• We will install the apt-cacher package and configure this to act as the apt-proxy for all the student machines.
• On this machine we will install the Ubuntu-dekstop meta-package with a minimal configuration. We do this after we have the apt-cacher software configured.
• Specifically you install the ubuntu-desktop by doing "apt-get install --no-install-recommends ubuntu-desktop" - This gives us XOrg and Gnome with minimal software and no OpenOffice (saving considerable download time).
• We install Firefox - "apt-get install firefox-3.5"
• We generate public/private key pair for the root user on the NOC, then we push the public keys out to all the students machines root account. Next we update the /ssh/sshd_config file to only allow root access with keys. We use our local admin scripts (here) to push our updates and execute software update en-masse.
• We update each student machine with a new /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01proxy file that points them to the NOC boxe's instance of apt-cacher so that once one machine installs a piece of software the Debian package files will be available to the other machines locally.
• Then we do lots of updates to the local student machines, but this is now easy using our admin scripts and the fact that software is locally cached.