On Thu, 28 Jul 2005, David Lucas wrote:
By the way, anyone want a DAMNED USEFUL TOOL for handling a cobalt
reinstall?
It's called an AMD k62 system with an add-in ATA controller that will see a
120G drive. I tossed one together with a removable drive bay.
Total price on ebay/any old computer store: about $20. No more idiotic net
installs.
Expand and explain please.
Absolutely.
First, apologies for the off-topic post (and for topposting). I'm in a
bit of crunchtime, and the annoyance of that post caused a "wow, they did
it...wait...wait...they can't even get the DATE right".
First: Know that a cobalt raq3/raq4 (at least with the latest ROM) CAN
handle a 120G drive AND 1G of pc133 RAM, as well as boot from an EXT3
filesystem. I figure it's common knowledge. From the cobalt hacking FAQ,
the largest disk you can put on an lba24 controller is 137G. (I don't
know how the raqware machines come with 200G, it could be wrong, I had a
120 handy).
I'm using this ram:
http://www.dreamhardware.com/products/details.php?product_id=329006 and I
believe a 120G seagate drive.
Basically, I was going through these instructions for rh9 on a cobalt:
http://web.nexband.com/
Because I wanted to put something recent and still-updateable on my
cobalt. And I noticed something. The redhat installer will automatically
put i686 binaries in (as the author of this document states).
Unless, of course, you actually happen to be installing to a 586-based
system. And that's my dirty little secret, and as far as I know, the
*only* way to "fake" the installer into not installing optimized binaries.
So I decided to dig through an old hardware pile and make myself a "fake
raq3". Basically this consisted of:
An AMD k62-300 motherboard
* 128M PC100 RAM (coulda gotten by with less, but I had it)
* An intel etherexpress pro network card
* Parallel ports disabled in the bios.
* Any old bootable CDROM.
* And then, to make sure larger drives were recognized by the system, I
disabled the onboard IDE Controllers and slapped in an extra "add on"
ATA controller. I was originally afraid that I'd have to redo /etc/fstab but
it seemed to still see the HD as /dev/hda.
* Two serial ports (basically standard).
* A removable hard drive tray.
In general, this means:
1) The installers for the various OSen won't annoy you with surprise
platform errors. (i.e. an i686glibc, openssl, openssh, and whatever else
you've decided to install). It also means you can safely use distro tools
like apt-get or yum to update or install additional dependencies.
2) The modules for at least one network card should be correctly
configured as soon as you drop it into the cobalt. In a perfect world,
this might mean you can spare yourself breaking out the serial console.
3) The system also plays nice as a "rescue console" for when things go
really wrong.
4) Steps IX and X in the above document can be skipped -- and trust me,
compiling openssh/openssl on a cobalt is annoying.
I've gotten FC1 working on a more recent one. A friend is shipping me
another raq3 that I'll be tweaking soon enough, and that one will likely
be built with debian. I've seen bits and pieces of documentation, I think
the biggest problem will be converting the kernel RPM to a .deb package.
(or maybe just to a .tar.gz file).
I've found these instructions for debian:
http://cobalt.iceblink.org/kernel/debian/debian-cobalt-howto.txt
And I think that building a whole TFTP boot server is a little silly, if
your system is already cobaltlike enough. :)
Also...I notice that the version of the cobalt panel utilities distributed
on that nexband site...
(http://cobalt.nexband.com/upgrade/) don't work at all well. They print
the IP address (if you install the script later mentioned)...but a lot
more can be done, I think. Has anyone made a working version of these for
this OS? If not, I can supply patches to do things like show
load, disk status...time remaining till the cobalt wins at Global
Thermonuclear War...
After that, I installed Webmin, Usermin, and VirtualMin (all at
webmin.com), which basically do almost everything (and then some) that the
big packages like cpanel, plesk, and such do -- for free. Oh and they've
been out for years.
--
"We need another cat. This one's retarded."
-Cali, March 8, 2003 (3:43 AM)
--------Dan Mahoney--------
Techie, Sysadmin, WebGeek
Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC
ICQ: 13735144 AIM: LarpGM
Site: http://www.gushi.org
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