I’m trying an experiment:
- Connect up a 750G drive via my SATA to USB to my machine
- Use VMWare Player
- Create a VM
- attach the VM to this 750G USB device
- install Ubuntu Desktop from ISO (Desktop = 32bit, target is a 32bit server with 2G ram)
- When done, transplant drive into headless server
- Hope it boots up and gets to the network so I can ssh into it without a display or keyboard.
According to my research, there is a gotcha step, where I tell it that “every time I boot, rewrite what is eth0 and what is eth1, etc”. See the docs here if needed: https://www.google.com/search?q=70-persistent-net.rules (I have not needed to do this so far)
Problem Number 1. When I reboot:
Then it got worse. It fails to recognize the USB-connected drive as a valid boot source, and I get “Operating System Not Found”.
Ah well! Lets try it anyway. Disconnect the drive, stick it in the Mediasmart server in the first spot, and power on ..
- It sure sounds like its booting. Lots of spinning going on with that drive.
- I can now ping it!
- I can confirm that the lights on the back of the machine coincide with ping packets!
Time to download putty and either telnet or ssh into my new diskarray computer!
Problem: neither telnet nor ssh work – I guess the servers are not up and running.
The next stop would be to put the drive on some hardware that can successfully boot it, install telnetd and ssh, and then move it back into the headless server. I only have one machine that can do that at home, and that’s my main computer.. that I need for work here in a bit, so its not happening tonight.
However, maybe I could look into setting up Ubuntu on a bootable USB flash drive?
