12.14.07

IPcop + Cobalt Raq = RaqCop

Posted in Hacks, IPcop, Security at 4:14 pm by Nate Smith

Here is a cool use for aging Cobalt Raqs and Qubes out there.   Load IPcop onto it!  The Intel and AMD-based Raqs have two network interfaces making them perfect for a common firewall/router.  I loaded it onto one of my AMD based machines.  Some things I discovered:

  • Seagate 7200.9 drives are not liked by Cobalts, don’t even bother trying to use them
  • Remember that IPcop uses port 222 for ssh.
  • Remember that IPCop uses port 445 for the https web administrative system.

Anyway, right now the installation for the RaqCop is a little bit painful.  The method I used involves a VMware disk image and a program called winimage.  Basically you write the VMware image to the Raq hard drive using WinImage.  Of course to do this you need a machine running Windows, and you need to remove the hard drive from the Raq.  I suppose you could plug it into an internal PATA slot, but I mounted mine on an external USB drive.

Two other points - you must have a “up-to-date” ROM in your Raq, and you need to boot from SDA4 or hda4 the first time you start the RAQ after installing RaqCop.  The RaqCop will come up with an address of 192.168.5.17 (a refreshing change from all those 192.168.[1,2].x addresses yes?).

After that you can ssh (on port 222 remember) to the RaqCop and run ’setup’ to configure timezones and interfaces.

Hats of to the RaqCop guys.  You can check it out over at http://raqcop.com/.  I hope they keep after it, it would be really nice to have a working LCD and an easier PXE-based installation.  Very cool project, check it out.

12.12.07

The Slug Lives!

Posted in Debian, Hacks, Slug - the NSLU2 at 11:36 am by Nate Smith

I now have Wordpress running on the slug - this blog in fact.  It still suffers from some performance issues, but I don’t anticipate being “digged” anytime soon.  I had to use lighttp, slimed-down mysql and php-cgi along with some caching to get to the level of pokiness it is at now.  I also changed the kernel swappiness setting.  Not sure if that is helping or hindering.  We’ll see how it goes.  It’s a bit of a hack.  Maybe the slow machine will act like tarpitting to the blog-spammers?