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The need to re-decorate the 'computer' room led to a re-assessment of the hydrus IT estate. Time to declutter. There were far too many computers in the hydrus network:
| Machine Name | Attributes | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| crimson | Compaq Deskpro 5120 120MHz 586 CPU 64MB memory 80GB hard drive |
FreeBSD 7.1 Web, mail, DNS, DHCP server |
| chrome | Dell Dimension p100t 100MHz 486 CPU 132MB memory 40GB and 60GB hard drives |
FreeBSD 7.1/Debian Lenny Samba file server Backup web/mail/DNS/DHCP server |
| gold | Abit BD7 Motherboard 1.6GHz CPU 1GB memory 80GB and 120GB hard drives |
Windows 2000 Debian Lenny, UNIX development |
| silver | MSI 645E Max2 Motherboard 2GHz CPU 512MB main memory 80GB disk |
Windows 2000 Debian Linux OpenSolaris Almost unused |
| topaz | Toshiba Portege 3500 laptop 1.3GHz CPU 256MB memory 40GB hard drive |
FreeBSD 7.1 Backup web/mail/DNS/DHCP server |
| maroon | Compaq Armada 7400 300MHz 128MB memory 6GB hard drive |
Windows 2000 General office functions |
| opal | Lenovo Thinkpad z61p 2GHz CPU 2GB memory 120GB hard drive |
Windows XP/FreeBSD 7-STABLE General office functions |
| tugg | Evesham build 2GHz CPU 2GB memory 2x250GB hard drives |
Windows XP Home Abused by the kids |
| steel | Toshiba Satellite Pro laptop 300MHz CPU 190MB memory 80GB hard drive |
Debian Lenny Backup web/mail server |
Stuff had to go and the older machines were obviously the ones to axe. While crimson and chrome had served me well, their time had come.
My plan was to move the crimson and chrome hard drives (2xFreeBSD and 1xDebian) to silver, since it had two spare IDE controller ports plus IDEs for handling RAID. At least crimson and chrome would live on in a reincarnated state. My first attempt wasn't too successful. I loaded crimson's hard drive into silver, making it the primary master drive. While it booted OK, the kernel would not boot as it had been compiled for a 586 chip. This was simple to fix: I put the disk back in crimson, installed the generic kernel from topaz and lo it booted. Crimson was back. Since the new hardware supported ACPI, I installed all the GENERIC modules. This left the root partition low on space, even without installing the debug version of the modules. At some point I would have to rebuild the disk to allow more room for the root partition.
I then installed chrome's FreeBSD hard drive, putting the Debian hard-drive from chrome into storage. The chrome kernel also had to be replaced by GENERIC and modules (notably acpi.ko) added.
I decided to install grub on the crimson drive, so that I would be
able to boot all four operating systems. The grub menu.lst
file looks like this:
default 0 timeout 5 title FreeBSD root (hd0,0,a) kernel /boot/loader title Debian Lenny root (hd1,4) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-686 root=/dev/hdc5 ro printk.time=0 initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-1-686 title OpenSolaris root (hd1,2) chainloader +1 title FreeBSD (ghost of chrome) root (hd2,0,a) kernel /boot/loader
I made topaz, the Toshiba laptop, the main server for hydrus, partly because it was the least power hungry, but also because it was quiet. And, it would be pleasant running the server on something a little more performant than a 120MHz processor.
On the original silver hard drive, I erased the old Windows 2000
partition and turned them into UFS2 partitions for access by
crimson/chrome (/tank and /tank1, respectively). I was initially
concerned that I wouldn't be able to format the partitions, as they
were logical not physical. I actually used the Linux fdisk
to delete and coalesce the Windows 2000 partitions However, FreeBSD
does create devices for the logical partitions so it is easy to
newfs and mount them.
Now silver has transmogrified into:
| Machine Name | Attributes | Usage |
|---|---|---|
|
crimson chrome silver (Debian and OpenSolaris) |
MSI 645E Max2 Motherboard 2GHz CPU 512MB main memory 2x80GB disks, 1x60GB disk and 1x40GB disk |
FreeBSDx2 Debian Linux OpenSolaris Samba server, backup web/mail/DNS/DHCP |
Each of the FreeBSD instances, crimson, chrome and topaz, had been built a while ago, and the root partition size of 128MB was now too small for FreeBSD 7.x, as it required much more for all the modules, complete with debug symbols (two copies, active and old). I had previously installed 7.x without debug symbols, but figured now was the time to resize the root partition.
My first attempt was with the chrome hardrive. Using crimson, I
mounted each partition on chrome and tar'd the contents to a backup
file. Then I used the sysinstall facility to alter
chrome's partition sizes. This worked, but I was unable to
newfs the disk partitions which gave me an "Illegal
operation" error. There was little via google, but I rebooted
crimson and then the new partitions were writable.
For crimson and topaz, rather than the sysinstall
front-end, I used bsdlabel directly. When invoked with
bsdlabel -e ad0s1, it throws you into vi to edit
the partition layout. The text looks something like this:
# /dev/ad0s1: 8 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] a: 1048576 16 4.2BSD 2048 16384 8 b: 1048576 1048592 swap c: 78140097 0 unused 0 0 # "raw" part, don't edit d: 1048576 2097168 4.2BSD 2048 16384 8 e: 10485760 3145744 4.2BSD 2048 16384 28552 f: 1048576 13631504 4.2BSD 2048 16384 8 g: 63460017 14680080 4.2BSD 2048 16384 28552
This can be then edited to something like:
# /dev/ad0s1: 8 partitions: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] a: 512M 16 4.2BSD 2048 16384 8 # / b: 1G * swap c: 78140097 0 unused 0 0 # "raw" part, don't edit d: 512M * 4.2BSD 2048 16384 8 # /tmp e: 5G * 4.2BSD 2048 16384 28552 # /usr f: 512M * 4.2BSD 2048 16384 8 # /var g: * * 4.2BSD 2048 16384 28552 # /home
where the asterisks tell bsdlabel to compute the offset, or
use the remaining disk space in the case of size.
The repartition of topaz's disk was slightly more awkward than
crimson/chrome, as it has no CD or floppy drive. However, I
acquired a USB CD drive and booted from the FreeBSD 7.1 live
file system CD. At first I thought it wasn't working as the boot was
unbelievably sloooow. Eventually, I was able to get into Fixit mode
in order to back up all the partitions. I figured I would do this
via NFS onto crimson's /tank file system. I therefore exported /tank
via the /etc/exports file and restarted mountd as
stated in the man page, i.e. /etc/rc.d/mountd reload. No,
/tank was still not mountable via NFS. It seems that using the rc.d
mountd script does not work; an explicit kill -HUP `cat
/var/run/mountd.pid` is required to get mountd to re-read
/etc/exports.
After an attempt to install OpenBSD in place of Solaris, I
accidently blew away the Debian install. Oops. I put the OpenBSD
experiment on hold and decided to re-install Debian Lenny and
coalesce the two tank partitions.
Here's a table showing how the four disks in the now thoroughly schizoid machine are named and allocated:
| Disk Type | Grub | FreeBSD | Linux | OpenBSD | Usage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WDC WD800BB 80GB | hd0 | ad0 | hda | wd0 | FreeBSD (crimson) |
| Maxtor 6L080J4 80GB | hd1 | ad2 | hdc | wd1 | Debian Lenny (silver) 40GB FreeBSD /tank 40GB |
| ExcelStor J360 60GB | hd2 | ad3 | hdd | wd3 | FreeBSD (chrome) |
| ExcelStor J340 40GB | hd3 | ad4 | hde | wd4 | Linux /tank |
The grub menu.lst file now looks like:
default 0 timeout 5 title FreeBSD root (hd0,0,a) kernel /boot/loader title Debian Lenny root (hd1,0) kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc1 ro printk.time=0 initrd /initrd.img # This is not operational at present title OpenBSD root (hd1,3,a) makeactive chainloader +1 title FreeBSD (ghost of chrome) root (hd2,0,a) kernel /boot/loader
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