Otter

Otter is a Toshiba Magnia SG-20.

History

03-2007-- I've had it for several years now. I used it with the stock Redhat 7.2 for about a year, then shut it down for a while. When I started writing this page, I did most of the upgrades described here.

Hardware

It had two 30 GB drives when I got it. I replaced the second hard drive with an 80 GB leftover from a laptop upgrade.

I pulled a 512MB PC133 DIMM out of a computer that I got dumpster diving, it works fine. It's not ECC, so I had to hookup an AGP video card and keyboard and turn off ECC in BIOS. While I was in there I set it to boot from the network. I can boot into Trinity Rescue Kit via PXEboot from a Linux desktop system.

The stock power supply fan was too noisy, so I hacked out the case a bit for more air flow. Then I put a 80 mm fan on top of the power supply and run it at a low speed.

The 30 GB drive is a Toshiba MK3017. The 80 GB drive is a MHV2080AT.

Software

Boot from network

If you try PXEboot, you need to set the card to use LAN for booting and you need to use the WAN network port. It's an Intel etherpro 100. I don't think the SG-20 will netboot off any of the other network ports.

I used the Trinity Rescue Kit build 279 and was able to ssh into the Magnia. I hacked the TRK startup scripts to allow this, by default it will require entering a new root password from the console (which is not hooked up, that's the whole point of the netboot.)

Having network booting means that I have another option when the system won't boot from its internal drives. I can netboot, then ssh into the machine and see what happened when it booted, see if it properly detected the hard drives and peripherals and so on. (The command after logging in as root is 'dmesg')

For example, right now it's not bootable from the hard drive but I can see

Probing IDE interface ide0...
hda: TOSHIBA MK3017GAP, ATA DISK drive
hdb: FUJITSU MHV2080AT, ATA DISK drive

This means that it's seeing both drives now; I had to change the jumpers on the 80 GB drive from Master to CSEL (cable select) mode by adding a jumper.

Using the TRK, I can mount /dev/hda1 (where I installed Ubuntu) and edit critical system files. So far, I have not found any problems... drat... :-)

For good measure I re-installed grub on the master boot record, grub> root (hd0,0)

Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

# grub
grub> root (hd0,0)
 Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

grub> setup (hd0)
  Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
  Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
  Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
  Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"...  15 sectors are embedded.
 succeeded
 Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+15 p (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage2
/boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded
Done.

I can see that it installed and that it found the right place to boot, /boot/grub/menu.lst. Trying to boot yet again...

Boot from hard drive

I am in the process of trying Ubuntu 6.10 Server on it.

The big deal with operating system upgrades on the Magnias is the fan control for the CPU and System fans. Without the proper control software, the fans stay on all the time.

The other wrinkle is the LCD display, but it's on a serial port so it's not a big deal to write to it.

I tried installing Debian on it a couple times but then decided I did not want to go with either the Stable (= OLD) or Unstable editions for this server. Ubuntu is closer to the head of the tree for software releases, and the desktop edition is running on two other machines that I use at home.

I want to be able to release the image when it's done, and I think that people will like the Ubuntu image.

Set up for image

hda1 3.0 GB /
hda2 3.0 GB 
hda3 ext
hda5 SWAP
hda6 

I am not mounting the other filesystems right now, to make it easier for you to customize or install onto drives of other sizes.

My installation includes the options for DNS and LAMP services. DHCP is turned on. So is ssh.

Servername is Ubuntu

Usernames and passwords:

root / admin
sshuser / user

I suggest you bring the system up disconnected from the Internet, and change these passwords before connecting it. Connect via ssh and use the command

sudo passwd sshuser
sudo passwd root

If you need an ssh client for Windows, I recommend 'putty'.

I made a backup using rsync before moving the hard drive back to Otter.

Other packages that I added

I enabled the 'universe' packages in /etc/apt/sources.list then added

• emacs21-nox emacs text editor
• xfsprogs tools for xfs filesystems

I recommend the use of the XFS filesystem over EXT3 for large (> 1 GB) partitions. I keep the root filesystem on EXT3 because it makes things easier when using recovery tools.

Other than the above changes, what you get is what Ubuntu provided.