Hrm. It looks like I’m going to be doing contract assembly of two Sequentix P3s for $300/each. One is the very original old case kit, the other is the newer design. One of the guys may want me to build up a modular for him as well…
This should satisfy my wanting-to-assemble-something itch, while at the same time getting me a bit bigger savings account.
Exhaust Mounting around New HitchEarlier this week I received the new hitch for my car. Despite being sick I spent a couple of hours today getting it installed. The directions claimed 30 minutes for an installation, but I imagine that’s for an experienced hitch installer with a lift. I just had a ~45°F garage, a tarp to lay on, and a fluorescent light to set on the ground beneath the car.
It took a bit of effort to get installed, but it was overall simpler than the Honda Music Link. There was some manipulating of the exhaust to be done (namely, lowering it and fitting the hitch over it), and some odd position lifting of an awkward 38 pound steel beam, but I’m happy with it. I’m really glad I was able to talk to
There are a bunch more photos of the installation here (photo gallery retired), or just click the image up top. The rack itself, a Thule 917 (1 1/4″ T2) is scheduled for delivery on Thursday. That should be a lot easier to get together, as it shouldn’t require any laying on the ground / wrenching on the car. Photos of that will be up once it’s here.
Also, I need to clean my camera’s sensor. And take another shower.
Maxrad BMM24005ML195NF and RP-SMA to Male N PigtailWhen checking the mail after (a long and rather satisfying day at) work I found that the RP-SMA to male N pigtail (adapter cable) I had ordered last week had arrived. With this fitted to my Maxrad BMM24005ML195NF antenna and connected to the back of the computer everything in the Trashwall is in place. I may reformat it once in order to test my posted config files (and to restore the CF to a fresh, clean state), but it’s otherwise set.
Now, time for the next project. I think that’ll be tearing into
Oh, and the trailer hitch should be in on Thursday, so I’ll try and get that installed on Saturday afternoon. For now I’ll just keep enjoying sipping this lovely glass of New Holland’s Espresso Love.
Presenting: the Trashwall, a repurposed Power Mac G4 AGP. It has been taken from an old, failing machine and turned into a powerful firewall which boots from flash, contains an 8-port managed switch, offers free public wireless via a segmented, built-in access point, and handles NAT, DNS, DHCP, NTP, and whatever else I might want it to do.
It’s also got a shiny serial console for setup / management and Open Firmware. It’s basically a real PowerPC UNIX box now.
The article is complete, I’m just waiting for a small antenna adapter cable to arrive so I can hook up the better 802.11b antenna. After that I’ll post one more photo to the article, but otherwise it’s complete.
So, if you’re wanting to stick together an OpenBSD-based do-everything firewall, you could do far worse than to check out the Trashwall.
Lovely Unintentional StarburstI love the unintentional starburst on this image which was taken while acquiring photos for my Trashwall article.
I didn’t do anything special for that… It’s just my standard Tokina 100mm macro lens at ƒ/18 pointed into the case of the computer, and no other processing.
Ah well, now it’s time for bed. My alarm rings in seven hours, and I have a long day of work ahead of me.
So, I won this eBay auction for some Compact Flash to IDE adapters. As you can see in the image, those adapters are supposed to plug right into a 40-pin ATA port. In the Trashwall I was hoping to plug one of these right into the main board and use it for booting the OS from a compact flash card.
Unfortunately, the seller instead sent me a normal end-of-cable mount adapter, similar to the one used in my MAME Cabinet, except without the second slot. At least it was the newer version which supports DMA transfers, which was one of the big things I wanted.
This evening I took the adapter, screwed some old motherboard standoffs into it, then screwed it into one of the Power Mac G4 AGP’s drive trays. Despite being something other than what I wanted to use, it has worked out pretty well.
It turns out that the two fastest (specification) cards I have are my Sandisk Ultra II 2GB and the el-cheapo Micro Center-branded 2GB card, which are both DMA Mode 2 devices. While this isn’t too slow, it’s not as nice as what I’d get if I were to shove one of the newer Transcend 133x as
Now, I just need to install OpenBSD on it again, fit it in the rack, and get it integrated into the network here. Hopefully I can do that tomorrow. For now, beer and relaxing.
Serial consoles are cool, and OpenBSD on a machine with Open Firmware makes it easy.
First, I came across these directions for making Mac to PC (MiniDIN 8 to DB9) null modem cables and made one out of a spare connector from the Honda Music Link work, some CAT5, a new female DB9, and a old DB9 shell.
After hooking this up and starting PuTTY as VT220 on COM1 at 57600 I booted into OF and ran the following commands:
setenv input-device scca
setenv output-device scca
reset-all
After this the box rebooted, the monitor stayed blank, and the OpenBSD bootloader showed up on the serial terminal. One of the many nice things about OpenBSD macppc is that it’s bootloader and kernel boot messages automatically go to the output to the OF console. All I had to do was ensure that this line was in /etc/ttys and the first serial port becomes a real console:
console "/usr/libexec/getty std.57600" vt220 on secure # for serial
Oh, and in case you’re wondering how I got a serial port on the G4 AGP I’ve been fooling with: I picked up an old Griffin G4Port on eBay. This is a drop-in replacement for the modem which provides an old MiniDIN 8 Apple-type serial port on the back panel.
I’m going to write up a lot more about this box on my main site after it’s up and running.
I’m going to hide this behind a cut because it’s just a bit of bragging / dorkyness about having lots of NICs in one box:
OpenBSD 4.2 (macppc) on a Powermac G4 AGPOpenBSD on PPC, specifically
Well, at least it’s now booting…
It might be nice to shove a bunch of four-port NICs in here and use it as a firewall / hub / bridge / switch thing. Then I could do what is essentially per-port / per-device monitoring and firewalling. I think it would work well to have the Airport Extreme on one port, my Mac Pro on another, the workbench on one, the Xbox 360 on yet another.
I wonder if this thing can run without a video card…
This would be good for ACK prioritization which would really help me out when loads of photos are uploading. Hmm…
Oh, also, the nifty real framebuffer, high-res, serif font is kinda neat.
I think next I’ll try and clean it out (it’s full of cat dander), get it booting from flash, and get the noisy fans sorted out. Right now it’s only pulling 54 watts, but I’d love to get that even lower if it’s going to be a firewall.
Hmm, if I got an Airport card for it (anyone have one of these — the old, original one?) I could also have an open AP, with monitoring, which only has access to the public internet. That’d be handy.
Am I the only person who really doesn’t care for Instructables?
I mean, the concept is good (sharing project ideas step by step), but the execution is rotten. It’s a mishmash of external ads, ads for other pages on the site, comments, hard to save / reference photos (which are often too low res), and YouTube-ish comments.
Uggh.
