The latest version of Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (6.0.7 as of this writing) should be installed on each physical host used by a HUBzero installation.

Packaging of this release has been done with Debian 7.x in mind, but due to time constraints support for Debian 7.x is not yet available. When available it will still have significant limitations due to the fact that Debian no longer supports an OpenVZ kernel. HUBzero will be switching primary support to Redhat Enterprise Linux 6.x packages over the next year.

HUBzero has packaging support for amd64 (64bit) Intel architectures. i386 (32bit) packaging is possible but was not produced for this release due to lack of demand.

To install Debian GNU/Linux, you can easily obtain a copy, and then follow the installation instructions for your architecture.

Installing Debian GNU/Linux using a small bootable CD is the simplest method.

When the installation is complete your system will reboot into a Debian GNU/Linux system.

Don't forget to remove your installation media and/or change your server's boot media order if you changed them prior to installation.

The precise configuration (such as disk configuration, networking, etc) is dependent on how the hub is to be used and what hardware is being used. These instructions outline the simplest "hub in a box" configuration but may not be suitable for larger sites. It is expected that the hub will be managed by an experienced Linux administrator who can help scale your site to the capacity required.

Throughout this documentation you will see specific instructions for running commands, with part of the text highlighted. The highlighted text should be modified to your local configuration choices. (e.g. replace "example.com" with the fully qualified hostname of your machine).

Optional. If you didn't specify the fully qualified domain name when running setup you will need to set it here.

HUBzero expects the `hostname` command to return the fully qualified hostname for the system.

# hostname example.com

To make the change permanent you must also edit the file /etc/hostname, this be done simply with:

# echo "example.com" > /etc/hostname

Now edit /etc/hosts by making sure that a line exists that looks like

127.0.1.1    example.com     example

Any other lines with "127.0.1.1" should be removed.

HUBzero reserves all user ids from 1000 up for hub accounts. As part of the HUBzero middleware every account must map to a corresponding system account. Therefore when starting up a hub it is required to remove all accounts that have user ids 1000 or greater. On a new installation there is typically one such account that is created when you set up the hub, and this account can be removed as follows:

# rm -fr /home/username
# deluser username

If you require additional system accounts, they can be numbered between 500-999 without interfering with hub operations.

Optional. If you didn't configure networking during installation you will need to do so now.

For help with networking setup try this link.

Setting up your IP address.

The IP addresses associated with any network cards you might have are read from the file /etc/network/interfaces. This file has documentation you can read with:

# man interfaces

A sample entry for a machine with a static address would look something like this:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
 address 192.168.1.90
 gateway 192.168.1.1
 netmask 255.255.255.0
 network 192.168.1.0
 broadcast 192.168.1.255

Here we've setup the IP addresss, the default gateway, and the netmask.

For a machine running DHCP the setup would look much simpler:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface - use DHCP to find our address
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

(If you're using a DHCP based setup you must have a DHCP client package installed - usually one of pump or dhcp-client.)

If you make changes to this file you can cause them to take effect by running:

# /etc/init.d/networking restart

Use whatever nameserver and other options as recommended by your ISP. If you used DHCP to set up networking it is likely this has already been set.

When it comes to DNS setup Debian doesn't differ from other distributions. To cause your machine to consult with a particular server for name lookups you simply add their addresses to /etc/resolv.conf.

For example a machine which should perform lookups from the DNS server at IP address 192.168.1.10 would have a resolv.conf file looking like this:

nameserver 192.168.1.10

Now configure the location of the HUBzero package repository by adding the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://packages.hubzero.org/deb shira main

You will need to get and install the hubzero archive key to be able to verify packages from the hubzero archive:

# wget http://packages.hubzero.org/deb/hubzero-signing-key.asc -q -O - | apt-key add -

Once the public key for http://packages.hubzero.org has been install you can then upgrade the current packages to their latest releases.

Look through the rest of the file. If you see references to "stable" you should change them to "squeeze" otherwise the system will try to upgrade you to Debian 7.x when you do an update because the current "stable" release is Debian 7.x.

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade