I updated my old Gentoo server to Ubuntu on Monday. I haven't finished the conversion totally yet, but I'm getting there!

My existing server was setup Gentoo with the following disk setup

/dev/sda1 50mb boot partition with ext2

/dev/sda2 512mb swap

/dev/sda3 250gb / with ext3 (about 60% full)

So I booted up on Gparted Clonezilla to shrink sda3 and create a new 20gb partition for Ubuntu. With Gparted its so easy! Once I had the new partition I installed Ubuntu 7.04 Server. The install process is... passable. It was fast, but having to manually choose the drive for grub to install its MBR to (especially when there is only one drive in the server) was a little surprising. I imagine that a first time user of the server install might have a difficult time knowing what to enter unless they have hacked around with Grub's menu.lst file before and understand what (h0,0) means.

The first important step is that I wanted to replace my use of DNSMasq on the old Gentoo server with Bind9 and DHCP3. DNSMasq is a great package. Its easy to setup and provides DHCP, DNS, and also does dynamic DNS. But I always felt like I was taking the easy way out. So I installed both packages using:

apt-get install bind9 dhcp3

I'm not at home so I can't post my config files, but I will shortly. The most difficult part was getting the file rights setup correct so that the DHCP server can communicate with BIND and BIND can update the zone files for dynamically created entries.

What I have now is the chadarius.no-ip.org domain set to dynamically update my external ip address. There is a no-ip package created for Ubuntu so I used apt-get to setup that up. I already had a no-ip user ID so it literally took 15 seconds to complete. Internally the DNS server serves the chadarius.no-ip.org domain. Any device that connects to my network automatically creates a dns entry for [device].chadarius.no-ip.org. Additionally I created aliases for my server to respond to webdev.chadarius.no-ip.org, asgard.chadarius.no-ip.org, ldap.chadarius.no-ip.org. I guess its my corporate background, but I like to have DNS aliases created for all of the services on a specific server. It makes it so much easier to move the service to a different server later on.

Next step is to recreate my LDAP setup from the Gentoo server. I integrated PAM with LDAP and also had an AD domain running that used the LDAP server. Its been a long time since I had to setup that up though. I feel like I'm almost starting from scratch again!