troubles installing RHEL5.5 on DL360G6

[joseph pareti]

I have made several attempts, the 2 most significant problems are:
(1) when using ilo2 / virtual media out of a windows vista laptop I always get disconnected. Is this a known problem with vista?

(2) I would expect to istall starting from a USB device created e.g. as follows:
# dd if=myRHEL.iso of=/dev/sdb1
But this lead to the error message "bad pbr sig "

more details in the attachment

[Alzhy]

I use Internet Explorer 7/8 on Vista/Win7 with Java 1.6 JRE with absoultely no issues -- iLo2/3 to DL380G6.

Maybe you have a LAN/Network issue? Is your lappy WIFI connected or hard wired? If the latter have you checked if your connection is correct -- i.e if you should be at 100FDX or 100 HDX or GbE?


(2) is puzzling. WHY do you need to have your RHEL ISO on a USB disk? I assume you *want* to install RHEL to the USB stick and boot off of the USB stick as your scaled down KVM hypervisor host? If you do - then use the various utilities for installing ISO images to run on USB.

If you are wanting to have your own Virtualization "LAB" -- why not just install RHEL 5/6 or Ubuntu or even Fedora to a separate Partition and dual boot? Of course if you really need to have your HyperVisor environment on a USB stick -- you can too but note - there are recipes for installing ISOs to USB sticks...


Cheers!

[joseph pareti]

the only "abnormal" thing I noticed in ILO 2 is a "certificate error" which however did not stop me from e.g. opening a remote console, etc. The problem with disconnect occurs with all iso files I have tried, including one that worked for me in the past when using ilo on a windows xp laptop, hence I'm suspecting vista.

The nw connectivity is Gb ethernet.

The reason why I want to install from USB is (i) the ilo way fails as described above, and (ii) I have no cd/dvd drive on the dl360.

I am not doing anything fancy at the moment, just trying to install plain rhel 5.5 and / or rhel 6, 64 bit, the iso files being downloaded from the hp intranet to my laptop using anonymous ftp.

[Alzhy]

Well if your Vista Lapto is Gigabit connected to your Network (and iLO) -- then why now access vMedia with the RHEL ISO resident on your Laptiop instead of on your USB.

Remember - your vMedia (ISO) could be anywhere - on your Laptop, on a network share, etc.. evn on a USB drive on your laptop (but if your having problems with your USB drive - why now have the ISO on your laptop's hardrive.)

You can also "enshrine" your RHEL ISO on a USB drive and make it bootable. It is not a simple dd of the ISO to the USB device though -- there are tools for it. One such tool is offered by Ubuntu and Fedora -- seek it out on their web sites. One tool I use is from Pendrive Linux -- called Universal ISO USB Installer... Google for it sir.

[joseph pareti]

virtual media doesn't work for me in this case regardless of the iso file location: hard drive or USB device on the laptop. My understanding of virtual media is that it MUST be attached to the laptop, since my LAN consists of just 2 nodes, the laptop I am using to serve up the media and the dl360 to be installed.

I agree that a plain dd of the iso file from a source to a USB device is not sufficient, the problem is that tools like Pendrive Linux you mentioned or other tools, like unetbootin don't work either in my environment. Presumably my distro is not covered by those. Since I am working with RHEL, I would expect to find an how-to guide from RH on using an USB device for a COMPLETE installation, which however I cannot find e.g. in http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/pdf/Installation_Guide/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux-5-Installation_Guide-en-US.pdf

I believe the only option left I have is to use PXE; for this case I have an additional boot/installation server available, a laptop running RHEL 4; but again there is a gotcha, the PXE - based installation requires the "pxeos" utility which I can't find on my system.

[Alzhy]

Joseph -- I feel your pain man but I am really surprised your vMedia does not work. What error message do you get?


Maybe your ISO is faulty? If you got it via FTP -- maybe it was lost in translation? (meaning you did not use binary or something?) -- far remote I know but who knows.

I've NEVER had any issues at all with ISO boot/install from virtually any Virtual Media, remote media, remote drive/ISO facility on vMware, KVM, HP iLO and IBM RSA/RSA-II.

[Viktor Balogh]

> (1) when using ilo2 / virtual media out of a windows vista laptop I always get disconnected. Is this a known problem with vista?

use it with internet explorer, and do not close the popup window because it will be like forcing the media out of the tray.

[Alzhy]

Never had any issues.

I did most of my DL380G6's, IBM x3850 RSA-II ISO installs right from my PC which is just 100MBps connected -- but it is a very robust LAN connection.

[joseph pareti]

I finally installed RHEL5.5 using PXE and NFS, as described in the attachment. All other methods did not work for me. The iso file was the very same all along, so there was nothing wrong with the initial file transfer. I must say, contrary to folks' opinion I was disappointed about ilo (release 2 at least).

Thanks to everybody for the good advice and support.