Raqcop 1.4.20cvs

[Davesworld]

The next version of IPCop will be 1.4.20 and the updates are in two stages, 1.4.19 and 1.4.20. I've uploaded recent Cobalt friendly builds from cvs grabs. Still, it's there for the sake of watching progress, it is advisable to stick with the most recent build of raqcop 1.4.18 for daily use.

I've had good luck making the 1.4.19 update relevant to Raqcop as I had to edit the rootfiles anyway for the bzipped kernel and lack of vmlinuz. 1.4.20 update doesn't involve /boot so I didn't need to mess with it. I will provide the updates for those not wanting to tear apart their Cobalt.

Remember, THIS IS NOT BASED ON A STABLE IPCop RELEASE YET so be advised of the risks by using it.

The kernel has been updated thus far an other minor changes are there already. IPCop 1.4.20 will be the last feature change update. After that, it'll only be security related updates and all new features will be slated for 2.0.

[Davesworld]

Hello folks! I uploaded images including gzipped flash images for a release candidate of what will be IPCop 1.4.20. These flash images are designed to run on a flash card rather than a hard drive and were made using the mkflash script IPCop posts on sourceforge.

The vmdk image was renamed to vhd for you WinImage users purely for ease.

  Other than changes by the IPCop team, what's new relevant to a Raq/Qube is an even better and more informative lcd during boot plus auto fsck repair in more than one stage. It now requires no user intervention until error level 4 instead of 2 and auto has been replaced with automatic yes. If it gets to level 4 which really should have user intervention, the lcd will tell you so and pause, and tell you to hook up a serial console cable.

This version will run on a Raq550 or the Raq/Qube3 and Raq 4 with the same build and the lcd works fine during boot on a 550 but is not much use once up and running. You probably wouldn't be able to stand to be in a room surfing the web with a 550 in front of you anyway with three 10,000 rpm 42db fans running in it. Still, it puzzles me.

Lots of kernel cleanups: IPCop 1.4.x is designed to run on most any pc hardware you could throw at it so it has many ide controller chipsets, cdrom, floppy and the like embedded in the kernel so people with a normal bios containing pc can boot from almost anything. In a Cobalt, between the Raq550 plus the Raq/Qube3 and Raq4, you need only two ide drivers plus ext2,ext3 embedded to boot. There is no floppy controller and the floppy driver is not used when using a usb floppy to back up Raqcop with so it's gone. The cdrom driver is now a module rather than embedded  in case someone ever wants to slave one into the second ide port and copy from it. Also, the keyboard not present warning is gone. These units do not have a keyboard controller and having keyboard and virtual terminal support was doing nothing but bothering us. A Cobalt can only use two terminals to get into the system, serial console or ssh, not tty2,3,4 etc, those are never present even with the keyboard and VT drivers. . Also acpi and apm support are useless on a Cobalt, The 550 Cobalt drivers which are embedded also now, provide their own acpi for the 550 anyway.

Sysinfo245 is already present in this as well.

To use with Flash, you need an ide to flash adapter, then ungzip the appropriate sized image and either dd it to your flash drive with a flash card reader in Linux or use Winimage in Windows. We've had good luck with the Syba UDMA capable ide to flash adapters. I provided the 128, 256, 512, 1GB, 2GB and 4GB images but truthfully, the only reason to use bigger than 512 is because that's all you can get at the corner drugstore these days. All that extra space with go to the root partition and only use 80 or so MB of it. All your logs and graphs run in ram and we use 64MB of it so don't skimp on memory. Hourly, the logs and rrd files as well as other volatile info is added to the tarball in /var/log_compressed which is untargzipped again on boot once the ramdisk is set up by rc.flash.up.