Centos 5 issues

ikhan42

Hello everyone,

I am new to this forum and a having a issue installing Centos5 on a machine I am putting together for a friend of mine.

The machine is a RAID machine that will eventually have a total of 8x1TB drives in it. My friend is a photographer and needs his space ability to grow. The machine will be acting as a server (NAS i guess they call it these days) so wont have a monitor, keyboard or mouse connected.

This is where I seem to be having an issue the graphic card that is in this machine is an ASUS 9400GT graphics card in it the installation goes fine the machine boots up, I can create shares and access them on the network. The problem starts when I boot this machine up without a monitor. I cant see what happens at this point of course but from what I can tell on the network everything seems to load up kind of.

I can see the share on the network, I can ping the machine and get a reply yet when I try to access the share it gives permission error and wont open it. If I try to vnc to the server againg I get permissions error, if I try and plug a vga monitor in at this point I get no video either.

I have a CENTOS 5 machine running as a server at home for my wife to store her pictures, mp3 and movies on and it is working fine if I boot with or without a monitor I am able to plug a monitor in at anytime and its works.

Here is my assumption and if anyone knows different please help!!!!

Assumption : The only thing I can figure is that the card has 2 outputs vga and dvi and if nothing is connected to either centos looses the plot.

Can anyone tell me if there is a way to force centos to use just one output method hoping of coures this is the problem.

Thanks in advance

ikhan42

Set_Killer

Well, i am not sure but try to run CentOS without graphical interface. use only CLI (command line interface). i thik you can do that when remove GDM service from startup and other levels. on that point you can administrate via SSH. If you have ruter make sure you forward port 22 or the port that the ssh server is running.
After you remove gdm (kdm or xdm) from startup i think you can remove and dbus and hal.

try to read the logs and look for errors (EE)...

Xorg logs:     /var/log/Xorg.*.log
GDM logs:      /var/log/gdm/*
and also:      /var/log/errors.log.*
               /var/log/everything.log.*
               /var/log/daemons.log.*
and of course everything else from /var/log/*

which video drivers you are using?

gl

woboyle

Change to run level 3. Do that by editing the file /etc/inittab. You'll see the line (near the top of the file):

id:5:initdefault:

Change that to

id:3:initdefault:

Then, reboot. It will boot into multi-user text mode.

Honestly, I don't know why it gives the permission error when you don't have a monitor attached. It is possible that it is affecting the run level of the system. Besides changing the runlevel (3 is no GUI), you can also redirect the console to a serial port.

raluxs

I second the idea of working without a graphical environment at run level 3, as explained before, also I would suggest installing Webmin it will let you manage and configurea a great deal of the server via web.

Good luck