Building a new Microserver

Back in 2011, I bought an HP Proliant Microserver G6 for £250. Last week I upgraded to... A Proliant G8 for £270. Nice! Hurrah for Moore's Law!

Of course, setting it up is a bit of a mare. So here's a tangled mess of notes to hopefully remind me what to do...

Firmware

Download the latest gen8 firmware / BIOS / iLO.

Find a site offering demo licence keys for iLO 4.

Boot Order

I stuck in an SSD on the internal SATA port which is meant to be used for a DVD drive.

The internal RAID has to be set to "Legacy" - see Re: Microserver Gen8 - Boot order from different SATA Drive.

Then the PCI boot order has to be be set to boot #2 first.

BIOS

There's no UEFI. So any USB stick that you format will need to be made with:

sudo dd bs=4M if=Downloads/ubuntu-whatever.iso of=/dev/sda conv=fdatasync status=progress

Or mkusb.

It will take ages from boot until it starts installing.

Install

As per normal. Enable SSH when asked.

Make 2nd Ethernet Port Optional to prevent a slow start

As per StackOverflow.

Edit /etc/netplan/*.yaml and make the 2nd port optional: true

Make sure the root disk is taking up all the available space:

sudo lvextend -l 100%VG ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv

fdisk -l /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv

sudo fdisk -l /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv

sudo resize2fs /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv

SMART

Check the HDD quality.

sudo apt install smartmontools

sudo smartctl --all /dev/sda

sudo smartctl --all /dev/sdb

...

ZFS

Install ZFS

sudo apt install zfsutils-linux

Get the list of disks so you can refer to them by ID:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/

Create a RAIDZ with somewhat optimal values:

sudo zpool create -O utf8only=on -O normalization=formD -O atime=off -O compression=lz4 -o ashift=12 -O dedup=off -f data raidz  /dev/disk/by-id/ata-... /dev/disk/by-id/ata-... /dev/disk/by-id/ata-... /dev/disk/by-id/ata-...

That gives it UTF8, improved performance by not using access times, no deduplication, sensible block size, and transparent compression.

Check it has worked with:

zfs list

Take ownership of the pool:

sudo chown $(whoami): /data

Check the pool's health:

sudo zpool scrub data

sudo zpool status

Make it chunter a little less with:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/zfs.conf:

And adding the line:

options zfs zfs_txg_timeout=30

Add the following ~/.profile

df -t ext4 -t zfs -Th

zpool status

Read-Only Share

sudo apt install nfs-kernel-server

sudo systemctl start nfs-kernel-server.service

sudo nano /etc/exports

Add:

/data  *(ro,async,root_squash,insecure)

Restart with:

sudo exportfs -a

Make Ubuntu less chatty on login

sudo rm /etc/update-motd.d/88-esm-announce

sudo apt-get purge landscape-client landscape-common

sudo rm /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf

sudo rm /var/lib/ubuntu-advantage/messages/motd-esm-announce

sudo touch /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled

Set Up Python's pip

wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py

python3 get-pip.py

Misc

Set the right timezone:

sudo timedatectl set-timezone Europe/London

Update the certificates

sudo update-ca-certificates

And...?

What else do you install on a new server?