Raqcop 2.0-RC1 coming soon.

[Davesworld]

Well folks, with IPCop nearing the first Release Candidate for 2.0 I will also have an RC1 of Raqcop 2.0. I'm actually looking forward to being able to take it to my daily firewall instead of test Cobalts behind a 1.4.21 firewall. Of course I have always been uploading SVN builds to tinker with so some of you may be familiar with it.

Any addons that will exist for 2.0 will work. It may be a while before we see a lot of them. Many things such as Advanced Proxy are already built into IPCop Beta.

2.0 will use the 2.6.32 kernel for a while at least. As far as kernel patches go, I've been maintaining and fixing them since Jeff Walter is always working and is a newlywed. Hurricane Electric (Probably THE place where ipv6 can be had end to end) has been working him pretty heavily as well. I'm already up to kernel 2.6.39 and it took a lot of work since unbeknownst to most of us, the spinlock syntax in the Cobalt drivers had been deprecated for a while but as of 2.6.39 wouldn't even allow the cobalt drivers to compile. Fixed.  Also the old IDE drivers exist but are deprecated as of 2.6.39. Using the new PATA drivers works in equipment I am using the 2.6.39 kernel in. The root device, NOT the boot device has to be sd something in the cmos on a cobalt, not hd something.

 I tried this with the SVN IPCop builds and it works fine. Not sure whether I should just use the PATA drivers rather than IDE from the start in Raqcop 2 so that we can all set our roms to see sda1 as the root device which is boot in the lcd menu.

You will have raid capability in Raqcop2. I'm running a Raq 4 with md0 and the boot and root device in the rom on two flash drives no less. The rom has always had raid capability. It simply had to be in the kernel image. This is only mirrored drive raid and the Cobalt will still boot to md0 with only one of the two raid drives active. This is called degraded mode but at least it will work.

[Davesworld]

So far I have uploaded the iso image for RC1 in the VMWare folder under Raqcop 2.x. I had tried to use the PATA drivers rather than the tried and true IDE drivers for initial testing. On the 3000 series I could NOT get raid to work with the PATA driver for Ali even though it saw both drives. This was using a good pair of flash adapters and newer CF cards.

The reason for trying this is that as of 2.6.39 kernels, the IDE drivers are there but show as deprecated. I fear that they will go away eventually. I will stick with the IDE drivers for the foreseeable future and this is what you will see. I will continue to experiment with PATA as time goes by and hope that the ALI PATA driver will behave much like the ALI IDE driver does.

Now I am testing my daily use Cobalt with 2.0rc1 running flash raid1. The transition from 1.4.x required saving a lot of files and re-entering by hand. I am running a pulsar adsl card and got it working.

To Do before 2.0 goes live:
Have the update mechanism look for actual Raqcop updates from this site. I will have to set up my own gpg key to do this so that nobody will be able to apply the wrong update to a Raqcop. Raqcop keys should differ from standard IPCop keys to prevent mixup.

Have a minor change in the gui to reflect Raqcop and mention that it is IPCop for Cobalts at the very least. Love the 2.0 skin as is except maybe some Cobalt blue. I'm open for suggestions.