About a month ago I resurrected an old-but-almost-not-terrible computer (i7 940 2.93GHz quad core, 12GB DDR3, GeForce fx 460 – 1GB) with the hope of running it as an XCP-ng/Xen Orchestra hypervisor. The short story is I couldn’t manage have yet to get Dom0 working – but as I write this, I realize that I may not have had the CPU/System Board virtualization features enabled for a proper install. Though I really want to try the bare metal XCP-ng install again, I’m instead going to focus on improving my overall practical *nix knowledge and skills. To do that, I’ve decided to install Debian Buster (10) and track the process here.
The remainder of this post will function as a table of contents, each item linking to a specific task or similar table of contents for a group of related tasks. My primary goal is to create repeatable guides for myself (and maybe others?) to speed up future installs. Down the road, I’d like to encapsulate this in some sort of management automation tool like chef, puppet, ansible, etc. I realize many of these things exist in the form of System Manuals [Debian, Arch, etc.] – but this is my setup, for my needs – which will change with time.
The following is a mostly-in-chronological order of tasks that I have done to get my system to where I would like it to be, with a few more interspersed as future todos. Each list item will be linked to an article, each title of which will include a numerical index indicating the documentation order. This solely serves as a means to track the chronological order of my writing process. The order in which they should be done is mostly arbitrary, dependencies withstanding – i.e. if you want to force FTP authentication, you’ll have to create users first.
Without further ado I present my setup index:
- Documenting your system components
- Picking a distro
- Writing to installation media
- Installing the OS
- Getting to the terminal/TTY
- Conventions
- Interacting with the command line
- Basic CLI Tools
- Picking an editor – my case for Vi/Vim
- Using vi
- Package management
- sources
- Dealing with old hardware
- GeForce 390xx
- Security
- Users, Groups, Permissions
- systemctl
- Firewall
- Servers
- SSH
- FTP
- DLNA
- SAMBA
- Active Directory
- More?
- Configuring Peripherals
- Bluetooth (HID vs Audio devices)
- Bluetooth and Audio
- Chromium
- Enabling DRM content
- Virtualization
- Docker
- Virtualbox?
- virtualized XCP-ng?