Other Distro's?

[Bitbass]

I just came across this in my search for a cheap 1u rack mount Server to use as a firewall.  I used to use IP Cop but I've been on monowall for a while now.   I might be able to piece together how to create my own ISO from your readme's but I thought I'd ask first. Would it be possible to get a generic Debian or Ubuntu image with the drivers already loaded?   Having the flexibility to then install anything with Apt would be great.   I might even try Asterisk.  The size of the system would probably work well for a 5-10 phone setup.  Thanks for starting the great work on this. I love recycling old systems!

[Davesworld]

There are plenty of people already installing Debian and other distros on these units out there and just getting IPCop to do what we want it to do is plenty of work, especially since we need more work on the lcd and buttons and a real network installer. The others that do install Debian, FC, gentoo and others on raqs, have long writeups on how to do it, it is never easy to modify any distro to run on these units. They use a rom image on a flash chip to boot from and then hand off to a properly modified kernel in /boot that must NOT be vmlinuz but rather a raw vmlinux image bzipped or gzipped, they do not use a bootloader nor do they even read the boot sector of the drive. They also need the rom image flashed to take a newer kernel and filesystem and you have two choices, ext3 and XFS which are separate rom images. Flashing these units is daunting enough that it would discourage most people right there and you have to get it right before powering off or you will have a rack mountable brick. Since you are just looking, the natural progression from a Raq is something like a Tyan GS14 which looks similar, is only 15" deep and will allow you to boot and install from a bootable cdrom using a monitor and usb keyboard and will run any pc compatible OS. These are things to consider.

[cjohnson19401]

dave.. would you mind telling me how you created the vmware images of raqcop from the ipcop install cd's? i assume it's a just a few parameters that need to be set in vmware right? or did you do some kernel image mods for lilo to work? i'm toying with the idea of getting other UTM type distro's running on these things as well.

[Davesworld]

dave.. would you mind telling me how you created the vmware images of raqcop from the ipcop install cd's? i assume it's a just a few parameters that need to be set in vmware right? or did you do some kernel image mods for lilo to work? i'm toying with the idea of getting other UTM type distro's running on these things as well.

The VMware images are made with the assumption that you are using a 20GB drive, when making the virtual drive, make sure it is ide not scsi and set the size to 18.6GB. If you do not have access to WinImage, you'll have to make a fixed size image and need at least 20GB of extra space. Winimage will write variable sized vmware images to a drive properly. I also thin that it may be possible in Linux with the dd command and the right parameters. IPCop has three partitions and the /boot partition uses a different block size that / and /var/log. As far as what it takes to make something run on a Cobalt, read on.

First I need to tell you that a Cobalt unit does not have a normal bios and cannot use a bootloader. They will actually run without the Cobalt kernel patch but you won't have some of the Cobalt monitoring available in /proc/cobalt so I use the patches. The rom image in a Cobalt looks for either a gzipped or a bzipped vmlinux kernel image (vmlinuz will not work)  in hda1 by default and you need to set the root device as well so it knows where to find any additional modules.

I only embed just enough to start the boot process because current roms have a 1.8MB size limit for the kernel image. In a Cobalt, any Linux kernel you have in your distro is actually a stage 2 kernel because the rom already has it's own kernel and is a tiny os in itself. The rom passes a specific kernel argument to the stage II kernel, mainly to allow watching it boot via serial console.

There are several files that need changed and some things the kernel does not need. As far as ide drivers, they have to be embedded as well as the ext2 and ext3 filesystem. The only three IDE drivers any cobalt will ever use are ali15x3, serverworks, and hpt366 drivers, the latter is only on an XTR but those are best used as a raid fileserver.

Other files that need to be changed are of course the ones you would change for serial console access anyway and of course comment out all terminals except ttyS0 in inittab and also in the sysinit, comment out anything that looks for those tty's. Being headless, having tty's (VT) enabled as you would on a normal pc is harmless but annoying with errors.

Keep in mind also that you can only boot the properly prepared Linux kernels and NetBSD with the current 2.10.x roms, no other BSD kernels can be booted and NetBSD has to be started in the rom every boot, there is no set and forget for NetBSD.

I no longer use the Cobalt in kernel lcd driver and the pile of programs that can use it. The LCD is nothing but a parallel connected HD44780 compatible lcd on all 3000 series and the Raq 550, the XTR which is huge, uses i2c for it's LCD access. I'm using a single perl program that was developed just for IPCop from the french community to display bandwidth. A friend also sent me a single small program written in C that reads the buttons. Something would have to poll it though at intervals but I did try it and it reads all button events.

[cjohnson19401]

hhmmm i think i'll start with smoothwall or something similar to ipcop so that alot of the heavy lifting is done already. that and noone else seems to have done something like this, other than you.

 i tried doing the vmwareimage>winimage>cobalt HDD thing last night, but for some reason winimage kept crapping out at different percentages of completion when writing to the cobalt drive. the error message was nothing more than a blank window with an OK button. did you come across anything like this?

[weizen_42]

hhmmm i think i'll start with smoothwall or something similar to ipcop so that alot of the heavy lifting is done already.

Why?
It really *is* a lot of work to do.

[Davesworld]

hhmmm i think i'll start with smoothwall or something similar to ipcop so that alot of the heavy lifting is done already. that and noone else seems to have done something like this, other than you.

 i tried doing the vmwareimage>winimage>cobalt HDD thing last night, but for some reason winimage kept crapping out at different percentages of completion when writing to the cobalt drive. the error message was nothing more than a blank window with an OK button. did you come across anything like this?

Not that I can recall. Of course you have to do everything in VMWare just right, meaning that the vmware image cannot exceed the size of the drive you will image to, other than that and the aforementioned steps, hda etc, any installation problems usually occur while installing to VMWare and not while imaging the drive. USB key restores work just fine while using VMWare if you let VMWare take the usb key from the host os.

 I also have used a Dell GX100 Small Form Factor to install directly to the drive, you can get these for 25 dollars US on Ebay as of four years ago. I also happen to have a nic with the Intel 82559er chip as well as one with a National Semiconductor DP83815. The former is used on the Raq3/4 units and the latter is used on the Qube3 as well as the Raq550. Since last July, I compile support in for both generations of Raqs and the 550's are starting to come off of lease now and I have one so the same raqcop works in that as well.

I am not the first to run IPCop on a Cobalt. Had I set up my threaded newsreader to gmane and searched the entire devel list from when IPCop first forked, I would have seen efforts done by others only a year before I set out to do it. Turns out that I wound up in almost the same place.

I'm sure someone has run Smoothwall on these by now. The pcmcia support of IPCop 1.4 paved the way for making it 3G friendly and is partially responsible for my choice over smoothwall initially, there are other reasons as well that I will not go into here .