Julwrites Stuff

Setting up a Fedora Server on an old laptop

Setting up a Fedora Server on an old laptop

Several years back, I had loaned my old laptop to one of my mentees, because he didn’t have his own. This year, since he was about to start University, he had gotten himself a swanky new one, and so the old laptop returned to me. Seeing as I now had an unused piece of hardware on my hands, I decided that this would be a good opportunity for me to try experimenting further with Linux administration.

Some research and a couple of discussions later, I decided to go with Fedora Server. I had considered the more common ones, but CentOS and Ubuntu were more for desktop use, and ArchLinux was a bit too bare-bones for my liking. Fedora seemed to have a good mix of server and desktop (I could have a server and run a VM for the desktop) and so I decided that would be my choice - not to mention it came with Cockpit, which had interested me greatly.

I got the .iso file from Fedora and flashed it on a USB drive using Etcher, plugged it in, and I was on my way.

The installation interface was pretty much the same as CentOS (Well, they are from the same developers) and so it was quite smooth to get things started.

Then the hiccups began.

First wifi wouldn’t work, and I spent one night figuring out why that would be the case, running ncmli again and again to attempt to enable it or find the AP. Eventually it came down to this; I didn’t have wpa_supplicant installed (Which I found as an issue in the Bug list of Fedora Server 31), and so it was not able to enable the wifi device.

So I connected it via Ethernet cable, finished the install, installed wpa_supplicant, enabled and started iwd.service and wpa_supplicant.service, and connected to the wifi using nmcli device wifi connect ....

A few steps later I had Cockpit started up and connecting on wifi as well as ethernet.

CockpitLogin.png Cockpit.png

It was pretty sleek, to be honest, and I was quite impressed at how much I could do on it. It even had a terminal which allowed me to do most administration tasks.

Terminal.png

Then I attempted to create a Virtual Machine, thinking that I could try running a desktop VM on it, and expose it for use. I was getting pretty impressed at how easy it was to create and launch a VM in Cockpit when… I didn’t have space? It seemed that there was a problem with the drive management on my machine. Naturally, this meant that my virtual disk couldn’t be allocated, and when I attempted to fdisk away the problem… I fdisk-ed away my partition. One reboot later, I was back to square one.

… One reinstall later …

I started looking around my terminal to try and figure out what exactly was missing. Cockpit did recognize my disk with the correct size, but it wasn’t listing it as a drive to be used. Some lsblk and searching later, I found out the problem; I needed to create a new logical volume which Fedora had not allocated for when automatically partitioning my drive.

Now armed with this knowledge, I installed cockpit.storaged, rebooted the server, and now I could create a new logical volume. I created this, mounted it onto /dev/vmvol, and created a new storage pool for Virtual Machines.

Storage.png VM.png

Creating the VM was a little tricky due to storage. It turns out that the Virtual Machine Storage Pool was expecting XFS type storage, and that a Storage Volume had to be created within the Storage Pool before the VM could be created. With that up, however, it was a cinch to get a Virtual Machine workstation up and running and streaming on Cockpit. Very cool.

VMSuccess.png

This worked decently, and I was able to install Ubuntu in a VM on the server, boot it up, and access it both through Cockpit’s VNC viewer as well as directly from my desktop VNC viewer.

I then decided to host a code-server in a Docker container, and quickly discovered that Fedora 32 didn’t yet have support for docker. Some searching around later, and I found out how to get it working using Moby which was basically to first remove docker, then install moby-engine with docker-compose. This got Docker up and running, although - since Fedora 32 didn’t support it yet - with no cockpit support, which was a bit of a bummer.

Both as a stopgap measure, and also as a way of exploring, I decided to install Portainer, which could be installed as a Docker container in my server, and manage other docker containers; seemed like a good alternative. It was quite easy to set up Portainer, now that I had Docker up and running, and the web dashboard was quickly available.

Portainer.png PortainerConsole.png

In short, on top of my fedora server set up, I had to install the following packages: