Otter

Otter is a Toshiba Magnia SG-20.

History

I've had it for several years now.

Hardware

It had 2 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 dirve is a Toshiba MK3017. The 80 is a Fujitsu MHV2080AT.

Software

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.