digitalnomad

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.

Tags: airport express, alix, cron, nas, openbsd, osx, update

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 22:01 and is filed under Everyday Life, Gear, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.