Most of the time I know something about the stuff I buy, but in this case it was a little different: I got an ALIX.3C3 to use it
- as a NAS (to us it with OS X Time Machine and the Air Disk Hack)
- as a fancy cron-controlled alarm clock
- and as a littel web server for testing purposes.
I realized a little too late that Debian-Linux doesn’t really work headless (w/out a monitor) with the ALIX. This cost me quite some time. Luckily my friend and co-worker Tom convinced me to install OpenBSD on the ALIX. Alone, I would have never made it that far.
There were a few pitfalls and little pieces of wisdom that I found along the way that wanted to share. Hopefully this blog entry will help someone else on her/his path:
- Don’t use Debian with a headless ALIX (3C3)! It won’t boot unless you do stupid hardware hacks .
- OpenBSD is NOT evil and it is not difficult to understand. Find someone who knows the system, get him a sixpack of beer and inhale all the knowledge that the beer set free.
- cronjobs need to address shell scripts or programs with the full path (I don’t know why it took me so long to find that out, duh)
- mplayer can stream music to your Apple Airport Express Station – don’t even bother about setting up the sound card etc.: # mplayer -ao rtunes:device=192.YOUR.APX.IP:af=inet musicfileOrStreamUrl.mp3
- http://www.openbsd101.com/ is very usefull, but
updating upgrading from a snapshot to a stable version 4.x (replace the x with the desired release version) of OpenBSD can be done quicker – Thanks again, Tom:
- # ftp ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.x/i386/bsd ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.x/i386/base4x.tgz  ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.x/i386/comp4x.tgz ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.x/i386/man4x.tgz  ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.x/i386/misc4x.tgz
- # cp /bsd /obsd (backup your kernel)
- # tar xzpf base4x.tgz -C / (extract the archives to /, keep all rights)
- # tar xzpf comp4x.tgz -C /
- # tar xzpf man4x.tgz -C /
- # tar xzpf misc4x.tgz -C /
- # cp bsd /bsd (copy your fresh kernel to its final destination)
- # config -e -o /bsd /bsd (optinal: add 15% RAM to the cache of the file system)
cachepct 15
quit
- # reboot
- Adjust the PKG_PATH in ~/.profile to your the path of your version
- Exit, log in again, done.
- Yes, you are right: You can just replace the whole system and then reboot it. Try this with any other system and you will #fail!
- systat is a cool command
Sidenotes: The ALIX is equipped with a 4 GB Compact Flash Card. 4 GB is more than enough; currently not even 1 GB is used. In addition I attached a 2.5”-USB harddrive for my Time Machine backups.
Next project: Adding the Mir:ror as an interface to set the alarm clock using ruby-mirror.
