You might also consider reading Comparing the Logos of the Candidates or Night Manager by John Le Carre.
NetBSD on Cobalt Raq2
There are two things about me that not even my wife knows, until now: I learned the art of homebrew ‘nix on FreeBSD with its ports collection and my favorite Linux distribution is Gentoo. Obviously the reason she didn’t know that about me was that she wouldn’t care to know those things, but that’s beside the point. Caveat emptor.
Enter eBay auction 3045457980, a Cobalt Raq2. This is a 1U system that comes out of the box able to host web and email accounts. What it wouldn’t do, however, was run a recent version of Perl easily. After much frustration I went in search of some other OS to put on it.
The Raq2 is unique in that it is a server appliance — that is, it has neither a video card nor a CD. The way you install an OS onto it is via the network. Among the machine’s other hardware limitations, this last bit is enough to make me regret getting it, although I new in advance that this was the case. I just thought I would be able to get the software I needed working in the default environment.
My first though was to go ahead and put Gentoo on it — Gentoo is a nice Linux distribution in that it allows you only to install (what it calls ‘merge’) what you need onto your computer, similar to the FreeBSD ports. In the case of the Raq2, the fewer number of items installed, the better, so Gentoo makes a lot of sense. I was also encouraged to read about the steps being taken at the time to get Gentoo working on this architecture (MIPS) — but alas, it hadn’t proceeded to the level where it just worked. Too bad.
Finally I came around to NetBSD/cobalt, a sibling of both the FreeBSD I used to use and Mac OS X that I currently do. The great news was that the install CD I found ‘just worked’ over the network, given that I could boot it on a local x86 machine. Here were the steps:
- Burn the ISO to CD.
- Boot the CD in an i386 machine.
- Netboot the cobalt (hold Left and Right buttons together when powering on - status will read “Net Booting”)
- Telnet to the machine and away you go (IP on the status panel)
I just happened to have a laptop of that sort home from work so I booted the CD, let the system come up, reboot the Raq2 using the front panel sequence to have it look for a netboot, and off it went. Within a couple of minutes (~15) I had a new NetBSD install on my Raq2.
As I mentioned earlier, NetBSD uses a package/ports system for handling software for install. The easiest way to see what was available was to update the ports, and then scan what was there.
First, the update:
cd /usr/pkgsrc/
setenv CVSROOT anoncvs@anoncvs.netbsd.org:/cvsroot
setenv CVS_RSH ssh
cvs -q update -dP
Then, to take a look around:
ls -la
Installing items is as easy (but not as quick) as just moving into the directory and typing:
make install
From there the system does it all: fetching the source of the software and all dependent packages and libraries, configures them and compiles. Removing the software is as easy:
make deinstall
The packages are installed in:
/usr/pkg/bin/
The first ones I installed were: openssh, perl, rsync, and webmin. This all took quite a while, needless to say. The Raq2 is not a powerful machine by today’s standards. Regardless, it does serve its purpose as an offline processor of Level12 SEC data now and I’m happy about that.
written by Kevin in web stuff