Installing your Intranet Server

After installing the Gateway server let’s continue on to the Intranet server. Here the steps to be followed are quite similar to those detailed in the previous article, Installing a Gateway Server. To avoid redundancy, we will only look at the steps that differ from it.

Make sure that the Intranet server is equipped with two NICs–eth0 and eth1.

1. Refer to the Gateway install and do the pre-install step. After that, execute steps 1—5, in which you will set the installer language, keyboard layout and mouse configuration.

2. When asked for an install type, choose ‘Intranet Server System
   
   (PCQ)’.

3. Now go on to steps 7—14 of the gateway installation, which covers partitioning, networking, firewall, OS language, time zone, and root password. Since the Intranet server is equipped with two NICs–eth0 and eth1, we need to configure both of them. eth0 is the external interface that talks to the Gateway server and eth1 is the internal interface that talks to the LAN.

The network properties for eth0 is as follows:

IP Address: 192.168.0.2



Netmask: 255.255.255.0


Network: 192.168.0.0


And the network properties for eth1 is:


IP Address: 192.168.1.1


Netmask: 255.255.255.0


Network: 192.168.1.0

Set:

Hostname: intranet.pcqlinux.com



Primary Nameserver: 127.0.0.1


Secondary Nameserver:


Tertiary Nameserver:


Remember to choose ‘no firewall’ in the firewall setup screen, when prompted.

4. Since this install type includes the X Window System, you will have to configure X. The first step is the display card configuration. For this you can usually rely on the auto-detected defaults.

5. Then you will be asked to select your monitor. Again, the auto-detected defaults are quite reliable here.

6. The next screen asks several questions. First, select your preferred display resolution. Then choose your default desktop–KDE or GNOME. You will then be given an opportunity to choose whether your Intranet server boots directly into X or not. We strongly recommend that you select booting into console (text) mode. Typically, servers are left unattended for weeks at a time and running X would be a waste of system resources during that time.

7. Package installation follows and then boot-disk generation. Remember to use a new floppy and test it at least once before use.

Your Intranet server is now installed. Refer to the other articles in this issue to configure it.

Biju Chacko is a projects consultant with

Exocore Consultings