Raq2, hardware initiated netboot

Somehow in my poking around I managed to damage something on one of my Cobalt Raq2 boards. To wit, it now no longer displays the cute copyright, and other boot information on power on. There is also no delay to go into being able to enter a boot command. I suspect that something bad happened to one of the 3 serial eeproms on the board. I guess I'll have to build that clip-on reader/writer sooner than I thought. *sigh*

So, with the lack of being able to direct the system to boot at my whim, I'm forced to rely on the front panel buttons to boot. (Hold down left + right for netboot.)

Therefor, to ammend my previous netboot setup instructions:

add to /etc/fstab:
/net/cobalt/root /nfsroot null rw,noauto

add to /etc/exports:
/nfsroot -maproot=0 -network 192.168.251.0/24

Then,
mkdir /nfsroot
cd /net/cobalt/root
mkdir boot
cp netbsd.gz boot/vmlinux_raq-2800.gz

This should get you going again. Hold down the buttons while powering on. You should see the message "Net booting" on the LCD. You can let go of the buttons then.

This gets more difficult if the box is already racked. My advice is to not break stuff.

Hardware Arrival!

Mouser shipment arrived today. Well, most of it.. the 2U case is still on backorder. Mostly what I expected. Though there were a few things in the "what was I thinking?" category. Mostly stuff like wrong gender of connector, or right angle stuff.

This order was for like 3 different projects: Better case for my soekris, case for scsi drives for my raq2, and the start on parts for my console server project.

I'm going to have to get really good at very fine surface mount soldering really quickly. One of the IC's I got is uber tiny. I'm going to have to see about getting some sort of carrier for it, as I don't want to be having to deal with any of those leads more than once.

Jury is still out on some other components. It's not looking good. I think I'm going to have to suppy +12V to the board anyway. The other option is to double the chipcount.

I couldn't find the rj45 block I was looking at previously. (I can derive the part #, but nobody seems to carry it.) Only 1 out of the 3 8-port blocks I got was double stacked. That one looked really cool until I realized that there were only light guides, not actual LEDs built into the thing. At this point, it will look cool, but I doubt I'll hook it up. There seems to be lots of variance on the pin layout. I may need to go back to the original vendor and see if their different parts can be used with the same board. I'd really like to have one board that fairly flexible on the number of ports.

With luck, i'll have a spaghetti prototype by the end of the month. (Assuming I can figure out remaining parts this weekend.) At least one trip to frys is in order for a better soldering iron and seeing about some prototyping boards.