Archive for August, 2006

Postfix virtual domain hosting

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

Links

Install Debian on Sun Netra T1 105

Monday, August 21st, 2006

I recently acquired a Sun Netra T1 105 to play with. A few eBay purchases later and I had 512MB of RAM and a couple of 9GB Compaq SCA drives installed. Debian is pretty well supported for sparcs so that’s what I chose to install. The install was done over serial console as this box doesn’t have keyboard or framebuffer support.

After netbooting a kernel image following the instructions here the rest of the install was just a normal Debian install.

After the install and rebooting the machine I was greeted with a trap 3e error and an ok prompt. From googling it looks like this is a common problem with several possible causes. The fix that worked for me was to put a small script in nvram (I LOVE real server-class hardware).

ok setenv use-nvramrc?=true
ok nvedit
0: probe-all install-console banner
1: probe-scsi install-console banner
2: ” Working around Trap 3e” type cr
3: boot^c
ok nvstore
ok reset-all

Note: line 3 is “boot” followed by a Ctrl-c to get back to the ok prompt

For some reason on this machine I had to do a probe-all followed by a probe-scsi for it to pick up the SCSI drives reliably after poweron.

The combination of a LOM (Lights Out Management) module and OBP (Open Firmware Prom) make for easy server management.

This website is now hosted on this machine in my basement.

Linux Quiz #005

Monday, August 21st, 2006

A Brief History of Shell (Submit Answer)

With apologies to Dr. Hawking, let’s dive right in. This quiz is a short one. Assuming a bash shell, what does the following command
accomplish?

bash$ ls -l !275:^

FlightGear Links

Friday, August 18th, 2006

Some links for the free, open source flight simulator FlightGear

Map Server
Flight Planner