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Re: New Qube2 owner with questions.



Mark wrote:

On 10 May 2008, at 05:35, Rowdy wrote:

AFAIK an IDE flash card is just seen by the system as an IDE drive, so
it should just work.

Compact FLash cards are actually ATA devices, so with the correct adapter they work just like Hard Drives. One thing I *have* noticed (I built a FreeNAS PC box up recently using a CF boot card and a 200GB HDD) is that my CF adapter, or the CD drive I used didn't like living together on the same IDE bus. That might cause an issue if your hard drive decides it's not going to play ball.

Shon has successfully run two IDE drives from the Qube's internal IDE port, so that should also not be a problem.

As the Qube2 has fairly modern ATA/33 onboard IDE, I'd have hoped it was buffered to take 2 devices (unbuffered interfaces sometimes take 2 devices but you get data collisions and even physical damage sometimes). I have no confirmation of this from any of my meagre hardware information sources, does anyone else know if it's properly buffered?

The 750G drive is probably 7200RPM - the only thing to be careful of is
excess heat generated inside the Qube's small case with small exhaust
fan.  The standard drives are 5400rpm in order to reduce the heat
generated.

I have a variable speed fan on the back of mine turned a ways down to keep the noise to minimum while it's sat up near my desk (I'm gonna move mine somewhere else at some stage). I have a 80GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 in the drive bay and it doesn't get hugely hot and bothered. I think as long as you maintain a reasonable airflow with the fan it'll be okay. I've left mine doing pkgsrc compiling for hours with no apparent problems and the air coming off the back doesn't seem to get much warmer.

Again AFAIK any standard PCI device should work, provided it is
supported by NetBSD.

Anyone got a link to the supported list of PCI hardware? I could do with knowing for an i386 project I am about to embark on :)

http://www.netbsd.org/support/hardware/pci.html

Quite a few people have tried to get various USB cards working in a Qube with mixed results. If you do get one working,
please let the list know :)

I haven't tried USB 2.0. I preferred FireWire as an option because of its better characteristics for Mass Storage. I have used 2 FireWire cards successfully though after a kernel recompile. I looked right through the kernel config and never saw anything for UHCHI and OHCI USB devices so I assume it's in the base kernel now so doesn't need a recompile?

Personally I usually just download each release (the most recent is
2008Q1), untar it into /usr/pkgsrc, and go from there.

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-announce/2008/04/13/msg000018.html

I actually managed to get he CVS repository to work when I downloaded pkgsrc the other day. It's not always worked for me before.

CVS is beneficial because with one command you can lets it sit on the net and update what needs updating from the CVS archive, which is marginally more bandwidth friendly than downloading the tar evert time. CVS updates do take a while though.

Absolutely, yes.  I do this for my FreeBSD server as it is facing the
world, and I like to try to keep up with security updates etc.  But my
NetBSD machines are generally hidden inside my network, most are older
slower machines, and it is a pain to recompile stuff all the time, so I
generally only update them when there is a milestone pkgsrc release.

As with any NetBSD port, you can do a binary upgrade without losing
anything.  I have done that in the past on my Qube, going from 3.0 to
3.0.1, and again from 3.0.1 to 3.1.

Anyone got a guide for this? It'd again be useful to know for when a new version pops up. I'd have thunk doing a backup-wipe-restore of 4.0 or later is a bit of a PITA at the moment as I've had to compile everything I use on the Qube2 from source, as the binaries are not available for cobalt currently (from what I saw).

http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-upgrading.html

Or, updating from source ...

http://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-updating.html

6) Does the Cobalt port (from that RestoreCD) have all the tools required to make a new RestoreCD ? And build new kernels etc ?

I do know the kernel sources are not included, but all yo uneed to do is download the 'syssrc.tgz' tarball from NetBSD.org and untar it to your Qube2 or another machine with MIPS CPU or Cross-Compiling toolchain.

Separate informative response from Tsutsui-san, however after re-reading
the question and interpreting it literally, would you really want to
build a restore CD on a Qube (or Raq)?  The compile time would be
horrendous! ;-)

Rowdy



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