Category making things

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 did with his IBM z50. But, being cheap and trying to keep with the spirit of the Trashwall, I’ll use the spare, leftover Micro Center card.

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:

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OpenBSD 4.2 (macppc) on a Powermac G4 AGP

OpenBSD on PPC, specifically ‘s old Powermac G4 AGP, is weird. I axed the i partition thinking the MSDOS-ness of it was something left over from the disk’s old use, but it seems that it is actually needed for booting. OpenFirmware will look there, since it can understand FAT filesystems.

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.

Do any of you happen to have an old motherboard + RAM + CPU which you don’t need any more?

I need something reasonably fast, Intel or AMD, with PCI slots. It is going to go in my MAME Cabinet and hold an AudioPCI running the fabulous DOS driver (thanks, !) and some flavor of MAME.

Really, I’m not too picky as to what it all is, so long as its reasonably quick and free. :D