Raqcop-2.0.0 Now Available!

[Davesworld]

Raqcop 2.0.0 is now available at http://downloads.raqcop.com/cobalt_ipcop/. The iso image for using VMWare to install is uploaded to the site now and the hard drive and flash images will follow. If you happen to have installed any of the premade RC1 images, they will update to 2.0 stable via the update page in the web gui provided you are connected via red to the internet. More on the update mechanism further below.

All of the benefits of IPCop 2.0.0 are realized on Cobalt x86 hardware as always with Raqcop. A special Thank You goes out to the IPCop development team for providing valuable input along the way as well as incorporating some of the Cobalt specific readable information in System Information as well as a manual startup in rc.sysinfo for udev to address hardware that cannot use an init ramdisk (where udev is started in a standard PC) and also for providing a great firewall/router distro to make a Cobalt adaptation from.

New to Raqcop 2.x.x is the ability to download and apply Raqcop specific updates via the web gui that are signed with a Raqcop unique key and downloaded from our site. This feature mirrors that of IPCop 2.x.x. This is much improved in general over IPcop 1.4 and more so for Raqcop from the lack of a decent update mechanism in Raqcop 1.4. Barring hardware failure, one should only need to install Raqcop 2.x.x once and update from there as updates arrive.

Please read the notes in the download section for specifics. You MUST use a nullmodem cable to use a serial console to setup the network upon first boot since the network configuration is tied to the mac addresses and utilized by udev. The network must be set up on the machine it will run on. If you use a raid pair, you will need to use the serial console in the rom menu to set both root and boot to md0. Single disk installations use hda1 as root and boot in the rom.

 A note about Cobalt x86 hardware: This hardware platform is biosless, uses a rom to launch the system kernel which cannot be a standard bzimage and is patched for Cobalt specific system calls, does not and cannot use a standard bootloader nor even see the mbr, and is headless which also requires extra work to prevent nuisance errors due to the lack of standard TTY's.

[Davesworld]

Just a quick note to mention that I revised the notes to make them a bit more clear and to ignore errors on the first boot. Since the networking will not be set up until after you boot the very first time on a Cobalt, you WILL see errors as services that need an active network cannot start. This is normal.

Since the standard IPCop kernel on the cdrom is used for actual installation to the drive, you need to run depmod before setup since you are running a -cobalt kernel now. This is the time to also set your passwords, host domain and so forth if you used the pre-made images. You may also want to edit /var/ipcop/main/hostname.conf and settings to reflect your actual host name if they don't already. Reboot once you're finished with everything, it's the easiest way to start all the services that did not start before and at this time the system will generate the http certs.