kennywest

In an earlier post I forgot to mention that installing NetBSD using the Restore CD option will wipe out your whole drive. So, before I started, I disconnected the hard drive and installed everything on the CF card. A basic installation of NetBSD does not require a lot of space. The 1 GB CF card was big enough for a basic install, but, to be able to use pkgsrc , I installed a 4 GB card. After I verified the installation was working properly, I decided to connect the hard drive again. This is where the problems started :( VIA Technologies VT83C572 USB Controller (USB serial bus, revision 0x02) at pci0 dev 9 function 2 not configured tlp1 at pci0 dev 12 function 0: DECchip 21143 Ethernet, pass 4.1 tlp1: interrupting at level 2 tlp1: Ethernet address 00:10:e0:00:3c:5d lxtphy1 at tlp1 phy 1: LXT970 10/100 media interface, rev. 3 lxtphy1: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto wd0 at atabus0 drive 0: wd0: 977 MB, 1986 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 2001888 sector...

Some time ago I described my adventures in installing Debian (Lenny at that time) on an old Qube 2. It was cool to install it, but I didn't find a proper use for it. So it has been gathering dust for a while, until I decided to use it as a backup server for my desktop and wyse . So, this weekend I decided to fire up my favorite mondo script and create a backup for the wyse (before dist-upgrading it to squeeze). Unfortunately this didn't work very well. The moment the network card in the Qube gets some load it starts to hang. After some time in the backup process, I couldn't ping the Qube any more. The serial console didn't respond either, so I think it died. Putting a newer network card in the box's free PCI slot did not solve my issues either. It seems that Debian (or maybe even Linux) is just not stable enough to cope with a lot of network traffic / load. So in short, Debian failed miserably turning the Qube in a decent (albeit slow) NAS. After googling for a...

The other week, a friendly colleague of mine brought me a small present. He gave me one of his Cobalt Qube s (for free!) which was collecting dust at his home. He was certain that I could give it a better use. I think I can still remember the days these things hit the market (somewhere in the late 90's). This was a home / office server appliance way before the people of Microsoft thought up their Windows Home Server . It was running some modified version of Linux RedHat, featuring a web interface for all administrative tasks. It also had 2 network cards, so you could easily turn it into a gateway / firewall. The RedHat version running on the Qube was known to be notoriously insecure. It was also running an older 2.0.x kernel which was outdated, even at that time. The Qube 2700 and Qube 2 were both equipped with a MIPS processor. Later models had an i386 architecture. Mine was a Qube 2. Getting the serial connection to work The Qube does not have any VGA adapter, so if you want to s...