And Now We Compile

So I finally got started w/ the Linux From Scratch project for Dulcea. Last night I got to the point where I can chroot into the stuff I have compiled so far (the compiler and file utilities, basically). Its going mostly smoothly but it is a fairly long process. My SBU is around 1m20s.

Anyhow, there were a few hiccups with my hardware setup and configuration... Firstly since I was doing most of this stuff remotely from work, I had to make sure I set GRUB to boot Linux by default. Well, I tweaked my networks cards and rebooted to make sure they perform as expected on boot and, guess what, Dulcea booted to windows.

Go me!

So on the topic of network cards, Dulcea has three. eth0 is the on-board NIC which you may remember as being scragged. eth1 and eth2 are both SMC PCI Full-Duplex 100Mbps cards (the 1211TX and 1244TX). Since I need to diffrentiate between the two I wrote the MAC IDs on the back of them. Pretty clever, da? It would have been if I hadn't mixed the two MAC IDs up...

Well after getting that sorted out I now have eth1 set as my external interface. Nikita is statically allocating it 192.168.0.2 and thus Dulcea deserves an entry in the hosts file. eth2 is the internal interface which Dulcea statically sets to 192.168.1.1. Oooo, aahhh. Different subnets.

With the network cards sorted out I cranked open my fstab on Dulcea because the NFS mounts are always mis-behaving. After looking at my entries and reading the mount and fstab properties carefully, I finaly have entries that load nfs mounts consistently and correctly on startup:

nikita:/home /home nfs _netdev,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 3
nikita:/home/share /mnt/share nfs _netdev,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 3
nikita:/home/ftp /mnt/ftp nfs _netdev,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 3

With basic system config crap out of the way (and grub.conf edited to boot linux by default so I can reboot remotely) I started into compiling my 1337 warez for Linux From Scratch (lfs docs available from www.linuxfromscratch.org).

Talk about a lot of slogging. I followed the directions to the letter. It is going smoothly but I am only just through chapter 5 which is compiling the tools required to compile (and the first mess is compiled statically).

So today I hope to put all the commands in a script file so I can just fire and forget. And also so I have the script file for if/when I build another LFS system.

More Gear

Mmmm New hardware. Tastes just like chicken.

So I made another trip out to NCIX to get the last couple of things I need to trick-out Dulcea for becomming the disciple server. A new large HD and a PCI NIC (in addition to the one she already has).

Got us a nice Western Digital Caviar JB series drive. This one is 7200 rpm, ATA 100 (didn't see any 133s around), 9ms avg seek, and a 8 mb cache. Its wery nace.

Heh. I didn't realize that Dulcea was actually using her secondary drive for Linux. Its a crap drive and I thought Linux was just on a partition (or three) on the main disk. Come boot time, not GRUB for you. In short, I got to "upgrade" from Redhat 8.0 to Redhat 9. As with Chevette, the upgrade wasn't very exciting. At least RH 9 comes w/ the 2.4.20 kernel.

Anyhow, the NIC I picked up was twenty bones which I guess I kinda think is fine. Not as many free PCI NICs as there are ISA NICs. Its a fair and popular chip at least. SMC 1244TX. In fact, the other NIC in Dulcea is a predacessor to that one. Its a SMC 1211TX. Both NICs are 100Mbps and support full-duplex and, uh, me ethernet 'em up good. Don't know why anyone would buy the 60-80CDN 100Mbps NICs, but apparently NCIX sells plenty of 'em.


Whoops, gtg. Gonna be late for work.