CentOS - Jun 2012 - 75% - 80% Rebuild Complete

First I want to thank all of you who responded to me both on this list and 
in the CentOS wiki. Your responses helped greatly! 

I want to say that if you are running CentOS 5 and you do not have a 
overriding reason to go to CentOS 6, stay where you are.  It was so much 
easier installing CentOS 6 on a new machine, migrating is next to 
impossible. 

Here's where I am today: 
1.      The base DVD install would not allow me to run the gnome desktop 
at 1920x1080 resolution with the default nVidia driver, the highest 
resolution I could obtain was 1024x768. However the text screen worked 
just fine after I introduced the video=1920x1080 in the grub.conf file. 
2.      When I installed the nVidia closed source drivers, the gnome 
desktop ran perfectly in the high resolution mode. The text mode then 
dropped to 1024x768 even though it retained the video=1920x1080 parameter 
(could it be those blacklist parameters introduced to disable the noveau 
drivers?). 
3.      During the installation I instituted software raid-1 along with 
LVM.  It all worked perfectly until I got to the Boot Loader screen and 
instead of using the default (/dev/sda) I used what I thought would work 
in a raid-1 environment IF one of the hard drives went bad.  I chose to 
install the boot loader in /dev/md0.  Of course it would not boot.  I 
recovered from this by going through the install and choosing to upgrade a 
existing installation and it allowed me to place the boot loader in 
/dev/sda.  What that leaves me with is a raid-1 environment that works 
great as long as /dev/sda remains.  How do I fix that??? 
4.      I still need to add all of those extra repositories (adobe; 
webmin; rpmfusion; etc). 
5.      I'm still trying to decide if I want a high resolution text screen 
(that I would use almost everyday) or a high resolution GUI screen (that 
I'll only use for certain application installs)???

At my 'real' job, we use RHEL and we've done some things using RHEL
6.2
for POC (Proof Of Concept) projects.  With a POC, we install using a 
standard installation DVD (as opposed to using our RH Satellite Server). 
All of this to say that there are application installation options that 
really fit the needs of a server installation, you can choose 'Server'
and
'Server GUI', which installs the gnome GUI without selecting a desktop 
environment..  Some things we run require a GUI to install (Oracle DB; IBM 
DB2 UDB; IBM WebSphere; etc.).  How do I select this type of environment 
using CentOS 6.2? In other words, I'm running CentOS 6.2 x86_64 Desktop 

TIA,
Gene Poole

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +

On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 9:47 AM, Gene Poole <gene.poole at macys.com>
wrote:
>
> 3. ? ? ?During the installation I instituted software raid-1 along with
> LVM. ?It all worked perfectly until I got to the Boot Loader screen and
> instead of using the default (/dev/sda) I used what I thought would work
> in a raid-1 environment IF one of the hard drives went bad. ?I chose to
> install the boot loader in /dev/md0. ?Of course it would not boot. ?I
> recovered from this by going through the install and choosing to upgrade a
> existing installation and it allowed me to place the boot loader in
> /dev/sda. ?What that leaves me with is a raid-1 environment that works
> great as long as /dev/sda remains. ?How do I fix that???
The MBR isn't mirrored, so you just have to install grub on the other
drive, usually by executing grub, then:
grub> root (hd1,0)
grub> setup (hd1)
but the numbers depend on how bios sees the alternate drive when the
primary dies.   It is always a good idea to practice re-installing
grub from an install disk booted in rescue mode so you know how to fix
things even if you have to move your mirror disk into the primary
position to make it boot.
> 5. ? ? ?I'm still trying to decide if I want a high resolution text
screen
> (that I would use almost everyday) or a high resolution GUI screen (that
> I'll only use for certain application installs)???
If you sit at the machine, you probably want a high res gui and to do
text work in terminal windows.  If you don't sit at the machine you
probably don't even want X installed for the console.  Run freenx for
occasional (or even regular) remote GUI access, or use ssh with X
forwarding for single GUI applications at a time.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com

OK,  I'm about 90% sure that I've corrected the boot loader situation 
with RAID-1 and the second hard drive.  I haven't tested the correction, 
but here's what I did:

    Examined the grub.conf file and noticed that hd0 uses (hd0,1), so
    what followed was
    grub

        grub> device (hd1) /dev/sdc
        grub> root (hd1,1)
        grub> setup (hd1)
        <after receiving the successful message>
        grub> quit

I didn't rebuild the boot loader on /dev/sda because it is working (if 
it ain't broke don't fix it).
My situation is that I'm using 4 - 1 TB hard drives and I used the 
following pattern:

    /dev/sda | /dev/sdc = First Raid -1 volume
    /dev/sdb | /dev/sdd = Second Raid-1 volume

Thanks all for the suggestions and thoughts!

Gene