I recently signed up for a small dedicated server at Kimsufi.co.uk for the grand price of £14 a month which I think is pretty good price for what you get.

Brand

 Intel
Model

 Celeron / Atom
Frequency

 1.20+ GHz
Architecture

 64 bits
NIC

 FastEthernet
Memory

 2 GB
Hard disk

 1 TB
FTP Backup

 100 GB
Bandwidth

 Heaps more than I need :-)
The machine itself is nothing special but they do have remote management and you can install a variety of Linux and windows operating systems. I am quite happy with their service and management tools but I wasn’t happy with the fact that they run their own custom kernels on them. The kernel that they install is a ‘grsec’ hardened 3.2 kernel but this caused a variety of issues when doing ‘yum update’, mainly dependency issues. I Googled around and found a few different solutions on remotely installing CentOS which were all basically variations on the way I describe in a previous post using grub to re-install. Whatever I tried with this including using VNCand attempting a fully automated install with a tested kickstart file it would become unresponsive when rebooting into the OS the first time.

Instead of all these methods I should have been thinking inside the box instead of outside it :-(

Solution:

yum install kernel

Then add the following stanza to /etc/grub.conf modified to suit the kernel that was installed (Check under /boot/ for the file names).

title CentOS (2.6.32-220.23.1.el6.x86_64)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.32-220.23.1.el6.x86_64 root=/dev/sda2 ro
        initrd /initramfs-2.6.32-220.23.1.el6.x86_64.img

and change:

default=0

to:

    default=1

After a reboot we end up with the correct stock kernel and the yum issues disappear.

The system is much closer to a normal installation and the only thing I am still unhappy with is the filesystem mounted at / is a physical partition instead of on LVM. This should be easily resolvable by creating a new logical volume and copying everything over and some updates to /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.conf to point at the logical volume and a selinux relabel but I will leave that for another day.