Jonathan Oxer
[Blog]
>> The RaQ2 lives again
Fri, Jun 30th 9:08am 2006 >> Tech Toys
A long time ago my business bought some Cobalt RaQ2 microservers which provided sterling service hosting customer websites for a number of years. The first time I saw one was at a PC show or something in Melbourne and I was instantly smitten. Yes, I'm partial to a bit of shiny. After much scraping and scrounging I got together enough cash to actually buy one a little while later, and moved all my customer's sites off the previous MacOS / WebSTAR combination I'd been running on a smorgasboard of Macintosh II / IIx machines piled in the corner (remember, this was quite some years ago!) and I've got to say the RaQ2 was a total godsend at the time. I loved my RaQ2, and it's how I was introduced to Linux so I'm forever grateful for that. I was already running NetBSD on a couple of Mac SE30s but it was the RaQ2 that really gave me the Unix addiction. So eventually as the business grew and more machines were bought we ended up moving to whitebox hardware running (very briefly) on Red Hat, and it was about then that I discovered Debian and the rest is history. But I digress. The point is that at 250Mhz with 64MB RAM the old RaQ2s we had lying around haven't been much use as production machines for a long time, especially with the oddball version of Red Hat they run by default. So a couple of days ago I pulled them out of the racks they'd been sleeping in for the last couple of years and started hunting around for ways to resurrect them, even if only as toys. I even gutted one of them to try to fit in a micro ATX motherboard with a PIII 1GHz, but it would have taken a lot of metalwork mods to get the ports out the back and the LCD would never have worked. And the LCD is half the fun of a Cobalt, so that plan was out. But to my great joy I discovered that some very smart people (including my friend Martin) have put serious work into getting Debian running on them, with a whole "cobalt" port just for the early MIPS-based Cobalt machines. Woot! So, after a bit of soldering of a null-modem cable, setting up of a netboot server, and poking around I now have one of the RaQ2s running Sarge. And the LCD even works!
A long time ago my business bought some Cobalt RaQ2 microservers which provided sterling service hosting customer websites for a number of years. The first time I saw one was at a PC show or something in Melbourne and I was instantly smitten. Yes, I'm partial to a bit of shiny. After much scraping and scrounging I got together enough cash to actually buy one a little while later, and moved all my customer's sites off the previous MacOS / WebSTAR combination I'd been running on a smorgasboard of Macintosh II / IIx machines piled in the corner (remember, this was quite some years ago!) and I've got to say the RaQ2 was a total godsend at the time. I loved my RaQ2, and it's how I was introduced to Linux so I'm forever grateful for that. I was already running NetBSD on a couple of Mac SE30s but it was the RaQ2 that really gave me the Unix addiction. So eventually as the business grew and more machines were bought we ended up moving to whitebox hardware running (very briefly) on Red Hat, and it was about then that I discovered Debian and the rest is history. But I digress. The point is that at 250Mhz with 64MB RAM the old RaQ2s we had lying around haven't been much use as production machines for a long time, especially with the oddball version of Red Hat they run by default. So a couple of days ago I pulled them out of the racks they'd been sleeping in for the last couple of years and started hunting around for ways to resurrect them, even if only as toys. I even gutted one of them to try to fit in a micro ATX motherboard with a PIII 1GHz, but it would have taken a lot of metalwork mods to get the ports out the back and the LCD would never have worked. And the LCD is half the fun of a Cobalt, so that plan was out. But to my great joy I discovered that some very smart people (including my friend Martin) have put serious work into getting Debian running on them, with a whole "cobalt" port just for the early MIPS-based Cobalt machines. Woot! So, after a bit of soldering of a null-modem cable, setting up of a netboot server, and poking around I now have one of the RaQ2s running Sarge. And the LCD even works!
>> Meeting up at OSCON
Fri, Jun 23rd 11:18pm 2006 >> Conferences
Looks like I’ll be doing a talk on the “encrypted filesystem” hack at the O’Reilly stand at OSCON at the end of July, so if anyone else is going to be there please let me know and we’ll arrange consumption of beverages. It’s a long way for me to come to the US from Australia so I want to make the most of the opportunity and meet up with as many people as I can. I'm going to cover the basic device-mapper stuff in Ubuntu Hacks but also take it a bit further and show how to do things like layer dm-crypt on top of RAID, and maybe even demo authenticating on Ubuntu using my implanted RFID tag.
Looks like I’ll be doing a talk on the “encrypted filesystem” hack at the O’Reilly stand at OSCON at the end of July, so if anyone else is going to be there please let me know and we’ll arrange consumption of beverages. It’s a long way for me to come to the US from Australia so I want to make the most of the opportunity and meet up with as many people as I can. I'm going to cover the basic device-mapper stuff in Ubuntu Hacks but also take it a bit further and show how to do things like layer dm-crypt on top of RAID, and maybe even demo authenticating on Ubuntu using my implanted RFID tag.
>> Ubuntu Hacks rips out of the blocks
Tue, Jun 20th 7:33pm 2006 >> Writing
I got home from work tonight to find a FedEx package from O'Reilly with my author's copies of Ubuntu Hacks, which had me jumping around the house like a lunatic until I calmed down enough to jump online and check the Amazon sales ranking - which spun me out (on the basis of only about 8 days worth of sales it's currently ranked at 9,687 in the Amazon catalogue!) and had me jumping around the house again! Woohoo! Go baby go go! I think I need more exclamation marks: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I got home from work tonight to find a FedEx package from O'Reilly with my author's copies of Ubuntu Hacks, which had me jumping around the house like a lunatic until I calmed down enough to jump online and check the Amazon sales ranking - which spun me out (on the basis of only about 8 days worth of sales it's currently ranked at 9,687 in the Amazon catalogue!) and had me jumping around the house again! Woohoo! Go baby go go! I think I need more exclamation marks: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>> Coming up for air
Sat, Jun 17th 11:15pm 2006 >> Misc
It seems like I disappeared off the face of the Earth for the last couple of months: I totally dropped the ball on a bunch of my responsibilities and it's felt like I've been in a major time crunch, but I can't really explain why. I'm used to extending out to 90+ hour weeks and being spread way too thin but a confluence of circumstances has made it worse than normal since about March. I've missed a lot of Linux Australia teleconfs, I've been far too passive and disconnected from things going on in the organisation, and many other areas of my life have been suffering too. Thankfully some of the crunch factors are now history: CeBIT is over, Ubuntu Hacks is now a real live book, and a couple of projects at IVT have progressed to less stressful stages. It's not time to relax just yet though. I'm off to the US in a few weeks to do two presentations at OSCON and there's lots to do in the meantime.
It seems like I disappeared off the face of the Earth for the last couple of months: I totally dropped the ball on a bunch of my responsibilities and it's felt like I've been in a major time crunch, but I can't really explain why. I'm used to extending out to 90+ hour weeks and being spread way too thin but a confluence of circumstances has made it worse than normal since about March. I've missed a lot of Linux Australia teleconfs, I've been far too passive and disconnected from things going on in the organisation, and many other areas of my life have been suffering too. Thankfully some of the crunch factors are now history: CeBIT is over, Ubuntu Hacks is now a real live book, and a couple of projects at IVT have progressed to less stressful stages. It's not time to relax just yet though. I'm off to the US in a few weeks to do two presentations at OSCON and there's lots to do in the meantime.
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