It's the end of the year and it has now been 4 years since I got my first server.
I'm not ordering a real server but taking an old computer from work and turning into my next server. The model is Lenovo 3302A5U. I'm going to give it 32GB of RAM and an 8TB hard drive. I'm not sure what I'll actually end up using it for but I think it would be fun to have another machine on the network.
I might try playing around with more devops stuff and try out OpenNebula but it might be underpowered for that. Worst case is that I use it simply as storage for my macbook plex server.
Onto the show.
Usually I would just use CentOS as I use RHEL for work and there is a certain comfort in keeping things straightforward. Now that CentOS is a testing ground for things to go into RHEL, I decided to forego it and looked into AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. Both of which are supposed to RHEL rips.
I decided to use AlmaLinux as that seems to be the more popular choice. Alma seemingly has won the war with Rocky Linux. Alma has the bonus that it has a non profit foundation that manages it while Rocky is owned by the person who started CentOS originally. This means that Rocky could possibly go the same route CentOS did while Alma is beholden to the board of a non-profit. This should make it harder for Alma to stumble into the same situation that CentOS found itself in.
As an aside, I like jumping around distributions and trying different things but for a server, give me something basically braindead and simple to use.
You can get the download from here.
wget https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/9.5/isos/x86_64/AlmaLinux-9.5-x86_64-dvd.iso
This is a fat 10GB file.
I'm doing this on a Linux machine. On windows you can use Rufus.
Use lsblk to find the correct device after plugging in the usb.
> lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 1 58.6G 0 disk
nvme0n1 259:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
The next step is to copy the iso to the device:
sudo dd bs=4M if=AlmaLinux-9.5-x86_64-dvd.iso of=/dev/sda status=progress oflag=sync
Plugging in the usb and running the installer was straightforward. The hardest part of it all was trying to set my boot order to have my usb first. For some reason the usb was excluded and I had to press to x to include it. Once included, I could then set it as the primary boot option.
I installed the minimal server and used the default partitioning.
Within 15 minutes I was booted into my AlmaLinux installation and read to go.
The only real configuration I did once the server was up was to set the hostname and to set a static IP.
The static IP was set using nmtui. I changed my interfaces ip using the TUI interface which is a bit strange, I prefer the text files from RHEL 7.
The hostname was set by changing /etc/hostname.
I installed Fish using the centos9 repos:
sudo yum install https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/shells:/fish:/release:/3/CentOS-9_Stream/x86_64/fish-3.7.1-3.42.x86_64.rpm
I had to install util-linux-user to get chsh surprisingly. Apparently I have gone too minimal
sudo yum install util-linux-user
https://www.reddit.com/r/AlmaLinux/comments/13050fo/why_almalinux_instead_of_rocky_linux/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AlmaLinux/comments/1g9axms/moving_off_rhel_choosing_between_almalinux_and/
https://almalinux.org/
https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-create-a-bootable-linux-usb-drive/