Grrr! Chickens and eggs...

[altivo]

So I got a windfall, a donated server (Dell Poweredge) that should in theory make a better router to control our bandwidth problems with people running P2P crap on their laptops over the library network. The donor is always extremely careful about erasing hard disks, so it arrived with the disks blanked and the RAID array controller reset. Fine, I didn't want Windows Server 2003 anyway, and that's surely what was on there.

The problem? This is one of those inch-high rack mounted servers. It has three SCSI hard drives and a floppy. No CD. It does have USB ports. So how to get Linux into it? Well, I thought, it should just boot from a USB flash drive or USB attached CD drive. That would be too easy, of course. The BIOS has no options for booting from USB, though it supposedly has "BIOS support" for USB turned on. Dell's "documentation" is not helpful at all, since it assumes that you are going to run the pre-installed OS.

I've dealt with this in the past on machines that were not able to boot from a CD by using SmartBootManager on a floppy, and telling it to boot the CD. Works like a charm. Unfortunately, SmartBootManager doesn't seem to understand USB either. I want to install Debian 4, and web searching finds various vague instructions in poorly written English that purport to tell how to boot from a floppy in order to the load a kernel and ramdisk from USB. The idea is to get the network installation version of Debian loaded, and then it will install to the HD by transferring packages from the Debian archives over the internet. That part is easy once you get it loaded. Unfortunately, I can't see any way to get these boot floppies to do anything with the USB either, despite the fact that they claim to be capable.

The remaining choice seems to be PXE, which involves booting from another machine over the network, using TFTP. And that would be easy, except that it requires that the boot address be passed in through DHCP, and of course that means not only setting up the boot server but setting up the DHCP server properly. The DHCP server for the staff network runs on Windows and is ugly to mess with. It may not even have the options needed. That leaves the private network used by the transient laptop users who cause this whole mess. That has a DHCP server that runs on Linux, and it can easily be instructed to pass the right parameters. But, it means I have to get the new server temporarily connected to that network, which is a VLAN with a limited number of ports. Gah! I wonder if this is even worth the trouble.

Then comes the question of where to permanently place the server. I was told it was rack-mounted and we have a rack with space and power. However, it wants a four post rack and ours is only two. That won't work. It will fit on a shelf in the server cabinet that houses tower servers, though. But wait, the cooling fans in this thing sound like a jet engine starting up. It would be better off in the mechanical room where the rack lives, rather than in the server cabinet that is right in the staff work area.

TGIF. I'm gonna go home and not think about this for a while. Maybe the answer will fall out of the sky or something. (Fat chance.)

Comments

[corelog.livejournal.com]

I have your answer. :) ROM-o-matic.

ROM-o-matic will allow you to dynamically generate a PXE boot floppy for use in your server. To work around that DHCP server of yours, I'd suggest using the Configure option and then selecting the USE_STATIC_BOOT_INFO option. This lets you manually define all the information, including the TFTP server and TFTP file to load.

This lets me use PXE boot in an environment where the DHCP server would normally not point me to the TFTP server. It should work for you as well.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'll check that out. Thanks, wuffy. *big hug*

Now I just need to find a machine with a working floppy drive to create the boot floppy. It's amazing. We must have nearly 50 PCs here, most of them running, yet almost all have bad floppy drives.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I have an amiga you can borrow :D

But seriously, I ams ure there has to be at least one with w working FDD.

Haven't you got one at home? You have plenty of computers there. ;)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. I have two Amigas. Guess what's broken on both of them?

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Oh, no :(

Hmm... I am sure you can get some spares for them. I think www.amigakit.com did spares. :)

Hmmm... I have 2 broken amigas, too, both missing a functional FAT AGNUS Chip. :(

But then again, I have a functional A1200 and a functional A500.
I think I need some new chips to restore them to their former glory...
Any ideas where to look? I am not sure if Amigakit did any.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Last time I bought Amiga chips like that, it was from Grapevine. I dunno if they're still around. But there should be some source I would think. It's just likely to be pricy.

How do you lose an Agnus?

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Got a faulty Amiga from a friend, and we tested it by swapping out components... Of course, there was a fault that had actually fried Agnus, so it got fried in the process of testing what was wrong with the other one. *sighs* I want at least one of them back to working order. :(

Grapevine? Do you have an URL? :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's been ten years, and I suspect they are gone. I don't find them in Google. Ebay is a possibility. And apparently there are Amiga dealers in Europe who have some older parts. Are you looking for NTSC or PAL? I think those were different chips.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

PAL please. :D

PAL is the european stan-- Hang on wait a minute.
I think they are actually the same. I think the PAL and NTSC modes were selected by bridging some pins on the motherboard.

So, I think they should be the same chips all over.

No matter. I still want one. :D

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

*bookmarks*

[soanos.livejournal.com]

*bookmarks in case it is needed*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You were right. That did the trick. Debian is now installing on the machine in question.

However, a worrisome thing happened during the first attempt. Apparently the Debian installer, once it asks you to pick the primary network interface, reconfigures that via DHCP. After that happened (and I haven't checked the log on the Windows 2000 server yet that would have supplied answers) there started to be some sort of conflict between the new machine and my own desktop (running Wolvix.) Things locked up on both of them. When I looked at my desktop, the hardware address of the eth0 port had been reset to be identical with that of the new server. This is utterly weird. I shutdown the desktop for the duration and the installation resumed.

[corelog.livejournal.com]

You're right, that is utterly weird. I have no idea how that would happen, though it would obviously cause problems, since they would both then receive the same IP address...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I know how it happened now. Windows 2000's DHCP server assigned an address to the Poweredge that was already in use: my address. My machine is a static address, but it's inside the range used by DHCP. Supposedly the Windows server is smart enough not to assign an address that is actively in use, but apparently it goofed. My hardware address wasn't actually changed, but in the network stats my IP address and name were appearing with the hardware address of the Poweredge. And, of course, once the collision became apparent to the routers and switches, both machines were dead in the water.

Poweredge now has a static assignment outside the DHCP range and with no conflicts, so that's fixed.

Oh, and guess what? The Poweredge does have a CDROM drive. It's very, very thin and well disguised. The system manifest at Dell under the service tag number doesn't show one, so I didn't look hard enough.

[corelog.livejournal.com]

I was going to ask why you would put your machine's static address inside the DHCP range...but then I remember that I have my desktop set up the same way, just with a static reservation inside the DHCP server itself. :P

Maybe I'm missing something:

[hartree.livejournal.com]

Use a Tom's Root Boot Disk or something like it that can give it scsi and network support booting from the floppy?

Re: Maybe I'm missing something:

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That doesn't get the Linux installer loaded. Debian has a very nice network installer but to bootstrap it you need to get a ramdisk image into memory and launch the kernel. Both files are too large to fit on a floppy, though they fit easily on even a small USB flash drive (64Meg is more than enough.) From there they get everything else that is needed from the internet archive.

I can get all kinds of minimal systems up and running to a command prompt, but there's no command there to issue that would launch this process, as far as I can tell.

Re: Maybe I'm missing something:

[hartree.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the rom-o-matic method mentioned above would work best for you. As soon as you get that going, it's a method you've already used and that installer will make the rest of it simple.

I'd probably have gone at it by using the bootable floppy to put a file system on one of the scsi disks. Then bring in the needed files over the network and make that disk bootable with the lilo on the root boot disk.

But, that'd take some fiddling around to get the particulars right and as you've said, this may already be more trouble than it's worth. ;)

It's been years since I've done that sort of thing and it's sort of a stone knives and bearskins sort of way.

Re: Maybe I'm missing something:

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Your approach could be made workable, of course. It's just not as quick and elegant as I'd like. I really don't like network booting either. It's real fiddly and you're running blind much of the time. That's why I was hoping to be able to just boot from USB, either a USB CD drive, of which I have one, or a flash drive.

Kind of hard to believe that no one has made a floppy bootable system that will reboot itself from USB, but I guess these days most people throw away any hardware more than two years old. Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of budget. Had this server not appeared, I was about to put one of my DEC Alphas in to do the job. Technically the library doesn't even own those any more, but it was sitting there looking for a more useful thing to do. Most of the advice from the net was "reflash your BIOS so it does USB" which isn't an option if Dell doesn't offer such a BIOS (they don't.)

[hartree.livejournal.com]

I still use floppies a good bit, but much of the younger set considers them as much of a relic as 9 track tape.

Then again, I tend to like relics.

Heck, my second most used machine is still running WFWG 3.11.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

3.11? Ewww. I like relics, but that's almost as bad as running ME. Besides the two Alphas, I have two Amigas, two Radio Shack 4Ps, two Radio Shack Model 100s, a Compaq Aero 486 notebook (which does have 3.11 on it because the hard disk is too small for Linux) and a NEC Starlet (CP/M 2.2 notebook.) Most are used now and then, some are used regularly. The Alphas run continuously on Debian with SETI@Home, but one of them dual boots VMS.

[hartree.livejournal.com]

No. I'll differ. Running ME is far worse than 3.11. One is retro, the other is masochism. ;)

Actually, that machine's a 486 and is mostly used for DOS to run old games on.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, I suppose, given that ME uses a lot more resources to achieve something that isn't even as good as 3.11, I'll go along with you there. At least 3.11 usually ran rather than crashing.

The Alphas are my favorites, and they are still pretty current since current releases of Linux are available for them, including Debian with its thousands of application packages. Unfortunately that's about to end. It looks like Debian developers are freezing the Alpha after the next release goes live.

For portable use I don't think you can beat the Model 100, at least for writing and keeping notes and schedules. Palms and Blackberries are too small for me. The Model 100 has a full sized keyboard and still goes up to 20 hours on four AA batteries. Recent technology updates have given it access to gigabytes of storage in the form of SD memory cards.

[marzolan.livejournal.com]

ME is fine once you bend it to your will. I ran it for several years and for the last 2 it ran more stable than most PC's I've seen.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. My most extensive experience with ME was on a laptop configured with Windows ME by the manufacturer. It was only good at freezing, locking up, or crashing with spectacular screen fireworks that should have been made into screen "saver" junk. One of the most entertaining tricks it had went like this:

Our primary library software application is largely written in java. It opens a window with buttons across the top and down the left side for myriad functions. When you tried to open it on ME, the window would appear in one corner of the screen, but the buttons would appear scattered all over the screen, inside and outside the window boundaries. It seemed to be random, in the sense that each time you tried it, the buttons ended up arranged differently, as if someone had tossed a handful of coins onto a desktop. Most of the buttons did not work, though, either by clicking them where they lay or by clicking in the place where they ought to have been. If you had several windows open from different applications, the screen became a total hash as windows moved to the front and behind, leaving partial button images floating around sometimes on top of other application windows.

This same application works without weird symptoms on every other version of Windows from 98 to Vista, and on Linux too. Only ME could muck it up.

[marzolan.livejournal.com]

ME had issues with Java overall. You may recall several times where someone tried to point me to a Java link and I wouldn't open it. It simply didn't work for some reason.

[corelog.livejournal.com]

I count myself as part of the younger set, if only because I'm not a grizzled veteran, but unlike my peers I insist on having a floppy drive, a serial port, and preferably PS/2 ports on my primary desktops. It's just too useful a feature to ignore just because "it's too old." :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The manufacturers are making it harder to get those. They really want to leave them out. Oddly, they keep including the parallel printer port, and I haven't used that on any machine in years.

[corelog.livejournal.com]

I don't mind if they leave the serial port out, as long as they include a header on the motherboard (which they generally do).

And since I build my desktops to my own specifications, I always make sure to include what I'm going to need. :) For my new machine, that includes Firewire, a floppy, PS/2 ports, and a serial port. At the minimum. :)

[canid-anubis.livejournal.com]

Maybe a flash of the BIOS would help?
Any way to pull a drive, copy the files you'd like to them, replace the disk and get it up that way?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

These are vintage 2002 machines. Dell appears not to have a newer BIOS for them, though I should check that again. You'd think they would.

The drives are Seagate SCSI drives, which could be formatted elsewhere except they are in those custom Dell carriers and would have to be removed in order to hook them up to standard cables. They are also in a striped RAID array, so doing it that way would break the RAID setup.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

What on earth are you going to do with that O.O Can you put a CD into it?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I could connect an external SCSI CD, but I don't have one. An internal CD was available as an option, but the space it would have occupied is filled by hard disks. I may try the BIOS flash, since the floppy drive is working OK, but I suspect the latest BIOS still doesn't boot from USB.

That seems to leave a network boot as the only option. I can make that work, it's just going to be more nuisance to set up and probably more debugging before I get it right. It only has to boot that way once, to get the Debian installer started.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Can't you just leave the CD drive hanging by the wires for the duration of the installation? :)

Done that many times... With FDD's, HD's and CD/DVD drives. :D

[altivo.livejournal.com]

No IDE controller in there. That was an option that would have been installed if a CDROM were present.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

Oh, bugger... Oh, well. I guess it is time to start making floppies then :>

*nuzzles* I have a computer problem, too.
Trying to get my Amiga on Internet, and Miami 3.2 keeps deleting the registration key I found. Without it, it disconnrcts every half an hour or so.
And AmiTCP 4.1 just plainly refuses to connect. Too difficult for me to configure I guess... :(

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I never used Miami at all. I've used AmiTCP, and still have a working installation on the 3000, though it has no ethernet card. Instead I use a hack that bridges the cheap 3Com card on the bridgeboard side over for use by the Amiga.

I think my AmiTCP is earlier than 4.1 as well. Maybe 3.2? There's an Amiga group here on LJ, and a couple of forum sites where you might find some more up to date help than I can offer. They look dead, but I've found that if you post someone usually responds.

I can't find Grapevine any more for your Agnus chips, but check Software Hut if you haven't already. They sometimes have replacement chips.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

I have some trouble getting my AmiTCP 4.1 to work... For some reason it can't get itself up. I think it is having problems with the config files. The card is a 3com Etherlink III 3C589D-Combo and the driver I am using is 3c589.device. But no joy for me. I have managed to get Miami 3.2b to rowk briefly, but as it is the unregistered version, it keeps diconnecting me around once every half an hour. Miami Deluxe 1.0c is not working for me because the dragdown menus keep closing themselves even though I am not letting the mousebuttons go, which is very irritating and makes configuring near impossdible. And I think it has issues with my configuration ability...

I'd love to have some help. :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, you're in an environment that I can't duplicate here, so I really can't be much direct help. If you have PCI ethernet cards installed like that, you're on a much newer Amiga than anything I have. You need to talk to people with the newer Amiga hardware. The only way I've seen that stuff is when running UAE, and of course in that you never configure the network because it runs as a parasite on the host environment.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

The card I am using is a PCMCIA card. :)

Doesn't matter, though, I managed to get Miami Deluxe TCP/IP stack running and configured. Works like a charm. Except that when I woke up this morning, it displayed garble for me and refused to boot for a moment. But now it seems to behave, more or less.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I can't do the PCMCIA either, though. All that capability came in with the 4000 and the newest Amiga I have is a 3000. I've heard a number of times that Miami wasn't entirely reliable (like so many Amiga software products, not enough quality control before they were shipped.)

AMITCP does work fine up through version 3.x, but I don't know about after that. You're right that it's messy to set up, and you need to go through the instructions step by step.

[soanos.livejournal.com]

I need someone to configure an A1200 with a 3c589.device with DHCP and send me the config files... :D

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

Puppy Linux has the option to boot to a floppy then load the OS from a USB drive. I've used this several times myself on older Dell desktops.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Puppy and DSL both claim to have this option. I couldn't find a clearly written explanation for either, though. Puppy is RedHat in disguise, so that's out. DSL is Debian, which ought to do what I want, if I could find enough details about it to figure out what to tweak. The explanations I did find were written in such broken English that I gave up.