CentOS on C6100

[Chuckleb]

I've been having problems on some of my nodes where during a CentOS boot or install, it hangs on:
Refined TSC clocksource calibration: 2266.746 MHz.
Switching to clocksource tsc

One of the nodes I was able to get consistently booting by setting clocksource=acpi_pm

This is CentOS 6.4 installed and 6.5 pxeboot installer.

Thoughts or similar problems?

Thanks!

 

[Chuckleb]

Right, wish there was a "resolve" thread option.

Oddly, setting IPMI port to "Shared" instead of "Dedicated" fixed this problem. I saw someone else had a similar solution for ESX for the ipmi_si_drv hang, so figured to try.

ODD.

 

[lpallard]

Just out of curiosity, how did you find CentOS overall? May be my next server OS...

Other than that, I fully agree: there should be a "Resolved thread" function to mark threads as resolved..

 

[Patrick]

Just out of curiosity, how did you find CentOS overall? May be my next server OS...

Other than that, I fully agree: there should be a "Resolved thread" function to mark threads as resolved..

On the CentOS side I like it. The single point of annoyance is that network ports do not auto configure with DHCP after the installer.

As for the resolved, I am going to put this in the to-do thread. I am considering moving the forums from vBulletin so enhancements like this may be a bit slow going.

 

[Chuckleb]

We use way too many CentOS machines so I am quite familiar with them. All of our clusters are and so I use that at home due mostly to laziness, but also cause it just works.

It is a really solid OS, but as with all enterprise OS available, you don't have good support for the latest and greatest. As a server OS, highly recommend. It is essentially Redhat Enterprise Linux so it is stable and used everywhere.

Lots of good secondary repos such as EPEL and RPMFORGE to pull things from as needed.

 

[lpallard]

We use way too many CentOS machines so I am quite familiar with them.

May be asking a few questions at some point if CentOS ever comes to replace slackware as my server OS...
I am at the opposite. I know Slackware more than anything else. Im not so comfortable with redhat (I remember when RH was still free, and then came Fedora.. thats what I was then using..)

I guess I've been using slack for about 10 years now..

 

[PigLover]

I've migrated all of my server-like Linux machines to CentOS, except one which is still on Ubuntu - but only because it is built from a pre-packaged OS/application distro that is rock solid (MythBuntu for DVR back-end). With release 6.3 and forward CentOS is just my happy place for server applications running on virtual machines.

For Linux work with GUIs I'm still using Ubuntu more than any other. Mainly because they seem to integrate kernel/driver/toolstack updates fastest and seem more stable with a wider set of application distros.

 

[lpallard]

I've migrated all of my server-like Linux machines to CentOS, except one which is still on Ubuntu - but only because it is built from a pre-packaged OS/application distro that is rock solid (MythBuntu for DVR back-end). With release 6.3 and forward CentOS is just my happy place for server applications running on virtual machines.

For Linux work with GUIs I'm still using Ubuntu more than any other. Mainly because they seem to integrate kernel/driver/toolstack updates fastest and seem more stable with a wider set of application distros.

PigLover (what a name BTW!!) so you're using several CentOS VM's under the same hypervisor? Which one? Before I had my latest server hiccups, I was intending to install proxmox, and have my slackware server as one of the VM's along with pfsense as another and a ubuntu machine to run other services...

Would you think a CentOS server inside of a Proxmox VM would work well and be reliable?

The proxmox datastore (the storage where the VM's would be stored) would be located on 2X 15k SAS drives on a RAID1 array using a M5016 controller..

My server's data would either lay on the same array or on another using standard 7k2 SATA drives

 

[PigLover]

IM(NS)HO, CentOS currently is the Linux distro of choice for server apps precisely because it is the most universally supported in virtual environments. Any of them. Equally solid under VMware/ESXi, KVM, Hyper-V, Xen, etc.

So - to answer your specific question - yes. CentOS should work wonderfully under Proxmox (which is really KVM, BTW - Proxmox is just a management wrapper and packaged distro).

 

[Jeggs101]

CentOS works great. Lags driver inclusion behind Ubuntu by a small margin usually it seems.

 

[BThunderW]

FWIW CentOS is also my primary go-to linux distro for server purposes.

 

[Mike]

Is that because of integration with Red Hat stuff, compatibility with 3rd party software or ...? In my opinion CentOS 6 is old news, even with the amount of backports it gets. Is 7 any good yet?
I really like Debian as the not-so-enterprise but still no bullshit operating system, mixing stable, testing and even experimental packages to your liking. Don't like the way this is works with epel.

 

[Chuckleb]

Redhat 7 is still beta so there is no CentOS 7 yet ;-) .

 

[BThunderW]

I like CentOS because it's rock solid. I care more about stability than being bleeding edge.

 

[PigLover]

Agreed on Stability. Ubuntu LTS is rock solid too but it gets too old too quick without updates. CentOS provides stability and stays more current.

Like I said - where I need the latest-greatest its still the newest Ubuntu release that gets my nod.

 

[lpallard]

Started playing with CentOS in a VM under VBox on my desktop machine until my server resuscitate....

I am very impressed. I am impresed by the easiness to install packages, dependency resolution, etc and especially on how the added software (lets say media apps like Couch potato, SAB, etc) are easily started and stopped provided you have a decent start-stop script.

There are some roadblocks I will have to get over somehow.. For example,

-during the install, i created a standard non-root user.. In my Slackware days, the server would boot straight to a root account and have everything else locked down. I know this is terrible... Under CentOS, do I need to configure the machine so it autologins to a non-root account which has all the necessary services automatically started ? This machine will be headless so no user input is allowed.

-I am currently using the standard account to manage the OS (using su and such). I hate nautilus and because there are no DE other than gnome (I didnt install KDE or that crap) which text editor and file browsers do you guys use? Eventually (on the real server), I will just not install (or uninstall) X server and all that relates to DE's... After all, under slackware, my server wasn't running any DE or graphical server...

-What about package updates and security fixes? I was burnt more than once before on slack (I am not sure why but I suspect it has to do with the lack of a real package manager and no depencency resolution) but often on desktop machines, I would run a massive package update and I would end up with broken stuff, machine that wouldnt reboot, stuff that would not start , etc.. Are updates under CentOS fairly reliable? In other words, do you guys auto update CentOS servers or you still do that by hand?

That should get me going!!!
Thanks!

 

[Chuckleb]

Updates are very easy and safe and the CentOS world, going full version updates 6 -> 7 will be hard as it is for any OS. Going from 6.1 -> 6.5 can be done in one step for example.

Services are handled by chkconfig, and you use runlevels. You can see what autostarts from chkconfig --list.

I am a command line guy so I use vim and nano

 

[MiniKnight]

I'm a total slacker. I install like nano and htop if not included.

 

[Magnus919]

As one of the guys who was there when the CentOS project got started, I've started moving away from it with CentOS 7. It's not a problem with the CentOS project itself, but with the direction of RHEL. RHEL7 is, I think, a major departure from previous releases. You basically have to relearn how to be a sysadmin with this release. Learning new things isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it seems like they made large changes that were perhaps too arbitrary, without much thought for keeping things "backwards compatible" with aging neckbeards like me. ;-)

With that said, I know this isn't Linux, but I've been smitten with OmniOS for the last couple of years. On the Linux side, I've been moving to the Debian & Ubuntu camp.

 

[lpallard]

As one of the guys who was there when the CentOS project got started, I've started moving away from it with CentOS 7. It's not a problem with the CentOS project itself, but with the direction of RHEL. RHEL7 is, I think, a major departure from previous releases. You basically have to relearn how to be a sysadmin with this release. Learning new things isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it seems like they made large changes that were perhaps too arbitrary, without much thought for keeping things "backwards compatible" with aging neckbeards like me. ;-)

With that said, I know this isn't Linux, but I've been smitten with OmniOS for the last couple of years. On the Linux side, I've been moving to the Debian & Ubuntu camp.

I feel the exact same way... Centos 6 was just fine when I started migrating my VM's to Centos 7 I was shocked by the changes and modifications they brought to the OS... I feel most of them were actually not required that much but RHEL opted to proceed so has Centos...

Often I feel that software devs create more work than required only to justify their existence. Dont even get me started on the Centos 7 desktop with this atrocity of Gnome 3 and UEFI..........

Once you get used to Centos 7 its mostly fine but the jump between 6 & 7 was unnecessarily complicated. That is for the headless version (server environment). For a workstation, ouch....