July 7, 2001  
 
 

2.2 Initial Configuration

Every workstation in your lab should be configured the same way, so once you have done one, you’ll have less trouble doing the subsequent ones. This repetition will help you learn this configuration well, so maintenance and troubleshooting will be less burdensome. I would begin by giving your machines identities. If you followed my directions above, you already have hostnames and IPs for all of your machines. Now, print labels that announce the machine’s hostname and affix them to each of your workstations’ CPUs. If you don’t like a number scheme, use authors’ last names, or colors, or cities. You can, of course, be creative here, but don’t confuse one machine for another. This is one of the reasons for the physical labels to go with your virtual hostnames.

Since we set the workstations to give a graphical login screen upon boot (runlevel 5), you should be looking at this screen. Instead of logging in this way, we will still use the command line to configure the workstations initially. To switch to a standard login, press ALT-SHIFT-CTRL-F1. You have just switched to another console, one of eight. You may get back to the graphical login, press ALT-F7, but login at the console prompt and su into root before you continue.

 
   
 
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