Part 2 – CentOS initial configuration

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Part 2 – CentOS initial configuration

After the initial installation has completed there are some small configuration settings the installation wizard takes you through.

Click Forward.

The Firewall page allows you to some basic rules quickly to the CentOS firewall (also known as iptables). Select the rules you want to allow in the drop down. As I want to use windows networking I have selected Samba here (samba is the Linux component that enables Linux to participate in a windows network. You also want to allow SSH, as we will use SSH to connect remotely to the Linux box.

The text on the SElinux page explains what this does, I have left it as Enforcing. I believe this is recommended unless you really know that you have to disable it. By leaving it as Enforcing I have not encountered any problems caused by this. It worth remembering this is on along with the firewall incase you need to do any troubleshooting with, you can at least disable these to isolate/rule out these components as the cause of problems.

I never engaged this but my guess is its similar to good ole Dr Watson.

Date and Time page pretty much self explanatory, set it. Ensure you get this as near as you can to the windows server times. Now if you have an internal NTP server you could set it to use this service to set the date and time. I had issues with this so I disalbed the NTP and set the time manually. I might come back and get this working as Windows networking (authentication) can start having issues if the times are out by more than 5 minutes.

The create user page allows you create a standard user for use on your linux machine. This user will be a local standard linux user.

I had no desire for sound in my machine so I didnot test this and Clicked “Forward”.

I skipped this screen

OK, initial installation and configuration has been completed. Type in root (remember this is the super user account in the linux world). Enter the root password..