Installing CentOS on Dell Optiplex 7040 - ScreamingUdder/wiki GitHub Wiki

Steps to install CentOS 7.1:

During install choose "Minimal install" with the "Development Tools" option selected
Configure the hostname
Do manual partitioning on the RAID array:
- Format main partition (mount point /) as XFS
- Mount the existing efi partition at /boot/efi
- Create a small swap partition, for example 32 GB is plenty
Set root password but no user account during install process
After install, download and install the ethernet drivers

Installing ethernet drivers

For the ethernet port on the motherboard:

Firstly disable "Secure boot" in the BIOS
Download ethernet drivers from here
Transfer them to the test machine using a usb drive, you can mount it with mkdir /mnt/usb && mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usb
Copy the tar to the local machine, then extract and do make install from the src directory. Ignore the catman mode error; it is only about the manual
Use modprobe e1000e, if it complains about a missing key then you have not disabled "Secure boot" in BIOS
Reboot, ethernet should now be working
yum install net-tools, after which you can use ifconfig to see ip etc

For the 10 Gbps cards (Intel X540-T2):

Card should go in the PCIe x16 slot, this is the black one at the bottom of the board, not the blue one which is only wired for x4.
If gcc, make and matching kernel and kernel headers are not already installed do

yum install gcc make
yum install kernel kernel-devel

and reboot before continuing.

wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/e1000/files/ixgbe%20stable/4.4.6/ixgbe-4.4.6.tar.gz

tar -xvf ixgbe-4.4.6.tar.gz
cd ixgbe-4.4.6/src
make

modinfo ./ixgbe.ko

Now unload any old driver, load dependencies (they were listed in the modinfo output) and insert the new driver in the kernel

rmmod ixgbe.ko
modprobe ptp
modprobe dca
modprobe vxlan
insmod ./ixgbe.ko

dmesg

make install
modprobe ixgbe
systemctl restart network
dracut -f