Saturday, October 04, 2014

A cable - a kingdom for a cable. Can you already see something?

Ok - when you do things the first time you make mistakes.

This was my first server I've ever build from scratch. I fiddled around with some equipment before, but buying a number of components and installing them was new for me.

Now the motherboard I have does have no video card as the folks who typically buy these extreme motherboards do bring their own video cards with them to render the monsters they are about to slay.
With me things were not so bright. Although I also bought a nice 24' screen I was still seeing nothing - basically because there was nothing to plug it in to the server.
Well - another trip to the store to buy a simple video card.

I did however initially bought a wireless card for the machine as I intend to place the machine in my study room. Historically this is where my DSL connection ended, so there was always a router with a cable present.

To my surprise I could not install the Oracle VM Server without a network. Obviously this makes sense when you are using this product in a data center which does not use WiFi a lot but all shades and colors of cable.

I investigated the issue and found that the machine was perfectly aware of its network sockets (two of them) and the WiFi card was detected as well. The issue at hand was the fact that the Oracle VM Server kernel was not equipped with the modules to support the ath9k which is the Linux wireless support for these kinds of cards.

Briefly I thought about baking my new Oracle VM kernel. I have done so in the past, so I knew what it would take to do so. I did some checks and found out that I would need to install a gazillion pieces of software to be able to build a new kernel.

I quickly abandoned the idea and now settled for the idea that I will have Ubuntu system running on the Oracle VM and use this as a stepping stone to connect to the WiFi.

Still not there. See the next post.

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