Installing Red Hat Linux on the Cobalt Qube 3 Appliance

The following is a technical recipe or "howto" document for one successful procedure to install the Red Hat Linux distribution onto a Sun Cobalt Qube 3 model internet appliance.

Warning! Use this procedure at your own risk.

• Red Hat on a Qube 3: Introduction
• Using Flashtool to Upgrade Qube 3 Proms
• Inside the Cobalt GenIII Kernel RPM, Part 1: Preparing a Sandbox
• Inside the Cobalt GenIII Kernel RPM, Part 2: Making the Ext3 Patch
• Inside the Cobalt GenIII Kernel RPM, Part 3: Building to Spec
• Installing Red Hat Linux, Part 1: Stock Distribution
• Installing Red Hat Linux, Part 2: Customization for Cobalt
• Installing Red Hat Linux, Part 3: Booting the Qube 3
• Ideas for Managing Red Hat Linux on the Cobalt Qube 3

Installing Red Hat Linux, Part 3: Booting the Qube 3

The hard drive should be ready for its initial boot on the actual Cobalt Qube 3 appliance. This last stage will finish the customizations on the Qube 3 appliance itself, where Red Hat Linux can detect and configure itself for the hardware of the Qube.

To ensure that everything is working properly, and to answer a few questions posed by Red Hat's kudzu hardware detection routine, the appliance will need to be configured to support the serial console, at least temporarily.

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Acquire and install a null modem cable. A null modem cable is not a modem. This is a serial cable with a DB9F on the Qube end, and probably the same DB9F on the desktop end. It should have the appropriate data lines crossed over for reciprocal PC-to-PC handshaking. Buy or build one according to published pinouts found on the web.

Transplant the installed drive back into the Cobalt Qube 3 bay. The proper IDE cable is the one closest to the edge of the Qube's baseboard (corresponding to /dev/hda and /dev/hdb). The drive's jumpers should be configured so that the drive expects to be the only device or master device on the IDE chain, to be found as /dev/hda.

Get the local desktop machine back in its regular booting condition. This guide assumes it runs Linux when booting from its original hard drives.

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On the desktop machine, acquire and use a terminal emulation package capable of serial port communication. For example, one application for Linux is minicom.

Configure the terminal emulation application for 115,200 baud, no parity, eight data bits, one stop bit, written "115200 N81". The console should work either way, but you may choose to disable hardware handshaking, depending on cable wiring. Turn on the application's capture mode if you wish to collect the output for review later.

The Cobalt Qube 3 appliance default prom configuration disables the serial port for console use. It must be configured to enable the console to use the connected null modem cable during bootup.

To enable serial console usage, hold down the obscure "change password" button during appliance power-on. Use a toothpick or paper clip tip to hold down the small recessed button inside the hole that is about 2 centimeters below the power button. While holding this recessed button in, press the Qube 3 power button. Keep holding in the recessed button while the device starts up. The LCD will briefly flash words to the effect of "Console enabled" if done properly.

Console enabled.

If properly configured for serial console use, the Cobalt Qube 3 appliance should momentarily begin sending information through the serial port.

Cobalt Networks, Inc. - Connecting the Dots Firmware version 2.3.40 Current date: Feb 17 01:28:19 UTC 2002 ROM build info: Tue Jun 19 01:18:56 PDT 2001 unicron.cobalt.com [...] INIT: version 2.78 booting Welcome to Red Hat Linux Press 'I' to enter interactive startup. Mounting proc filesystem: [ OK ] Configuring kernel parameters: [ OK ] Setting clock (utc): Sat Feb 16 20:28:52 EST 2002 [ OK ] [...]

Depending on the method used to power down the desktop and the new Red Hat installation, the rc.sysinit may force an integrity check of one or more partitions on the drive. This is expected.

The Red Hat hardware detection application kudzu runs on every system boot. If there are no hardware changes, kudzu merely quits silently. Kudzu will most likely appear during the initial bootup of the Qube 3 appliance, since the entire hardware architecture has changed since installation.

Using the text-oriented graphical interface in kudzu may be a little confusing due to its reliance on color-based input cues which are not available over the serial console. Every dialog box starts with the leftmost or topmost field being the active button. The Tab key selects the next button. The Spacebar pushes the selected button.

In kudzu, you may be given an opportunity to perform the following items.

• remove the entries for ethernet devices that were available on your desktop machine,
• add the entries for the *two* "natsemi" ethernet devices which are available on the Cobalt Qube 3,
• adjust any other detected hardware changes between the desktop and appliance environments,
• save these changes to avoid kudzu complaints in the future.

If all of the configuration and installation steps were successful, the bootup should eventually report that it is entering runlevel 3, and then stop outputting new messages.

Hit the Enter key on the terminal console, and a login mgetty process should display a prompt.

Red Hat Linux 7.2 (Enigma) Linux qube0 2.4.16C2_III login:

Check that the network operates properly, and that the sshd service is running via chkconfig, before removing the serial console cable.

Verify that the Qube has an appropriate firewall setup for the situation, that the appliance can ping other hosts on the LAN, that other hosts on the LAN can ssh to log into the appliance, that proper gateways and domain name servers are configured for appropriate connectivity, and that sendmail is able to deliver mail locally on the device, but is not a promiscuous open relay from the Internet.

Once the appliance appears to be remote-administerable, remove and stow the serial console cable.

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The core transfiguration of the Cobalt Qube 3 appliance for Red Hat Linux 7.2 (Enigma) is complete!

Next Section: Ideas for Managing Red Hat Linux on the Cobalt Qube 3