the trials and tribulations of getting woody on my powercenter 120
I've been working on getting woody installed on an old powercenter 120.
My goal is for it to be a stand alone ftp server, running only debian,
with no macos, no monitor, no kybd or mouse. (I'm going to be
co-locating it once I have everything running properly, so I need it to
be able to boot up unattended)
I've done a ton of research, and thanks to the help of many web pages,
got debian installed.
(if there is any interest in it, I can list the most useful sites I hit,
as the documentation for the install is a little light when it comes to
problem child old-world machines like this one.)
I've almost got the machine booting properly, but it's just not quite
there.
I haven't got the appropriate cabling, so I can't get a terminal session
to open firmware, and as this particular machine has a buggy OF
implementation (big surprise, right...) I can't use my monitor to view
the OF environment at boot. I've been using the boot/root disk combo to
get the installer running, then I execute a shell, and from ash, I can
enter commands through nvsetenv to make the changes I want to OF.
here's what I have it set to, where it will actually boot:
boot-device "/bandit/gc/53c94/sd@0:3"
boot-file "/bandit/gc/53c94/sd@0:3/boot/vmlinux-2.4.18-powerpc"
boot-command "boot linux"
after entering these parameters into OF, I reboot. the machine chimes,
then chimes again, then, after a brief pause, the monitor comes up, and
I'm into the os.
after logging into debian, I run nvsetenv to double check the settings,
and everything is how I left it. the only problem is that if I tell the
system to reboot, it fails to do so. it just sits there with a blank
monitor, and even if I wait a while, I can't ping it, so I know it
hasn't booted.
at this point, I have to zap the pram to get it to boot from a floppy,
go back into the installer, drop to ash, reset the variables in OF and
then I tell the installer to reboot the system. it chimes twice, and
then I'm in linux again.
I'm using quik as a bootloader, and my quik.conf is properly configured,
and I've upgraded the kernel to 2.4.18-powerpc from 2.2.20 as I would
like to have the system see the promise ata 100 card I installed along
with a 60gb hd. getting those to show up is another problem, but it's
one I haven't researched yet; if you happen to know how to get linux to
see a pci card, and get the drive mounted, feel free to let me know, but
I'm going to do the legwork first before I actually come begging for
help :)
any help/advice to solving this problem would be greatly appreciated.
thank you
--wylie
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