[callahan]

That thought had crossed my mind as well. Unfortunately, removing the desktop isn't as straightforward in this archaic release as it is with newer ones. I have never used this vintage of linux before either, so I'm learning as I go without a ton of ready resources available.

I do have the full GUI install, which I would be happy to share. The full .ova package is ~2.4GB, which is manageable but not trivial.

I may fool around with re-installing using the custom install option to get something more minimal. Likely won't be soon though.

[weblacky]

Oh, with old debians you don’t have to install gui at all. You select a core and not a desktop task/profile. It’s been years but if remember my prompts you removed default-selected stuff and just stay with core-kernel-shell.

After hardware detection it should have asked for what packages to install (after base system was installed), you just unselect “Debian desktop environment”. Then you get a console-only server. That’s how that’s done from install.

Removal will be much worse. Once you have your build recipe down, install a new VM, unselect desktop and print server. Select file server and NFS and you’d be good to start.

I’m old enough where we didn’t have graphical installs on Linux and had to custom configure Xfree86 and such. Also servers were always installed console-only to prevent constant package updates and dependencies.

[callahan]

Turns out the very early version of Ubuntu don't support this. There are a few "expert" install options that you can fiddle with, but the core OS includes gnome and there is no way to preemptively remove it.

So, I did a but more digging and found that OpenSUSE 10.3 (still available here: https://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discon...o/torrent/) has similar versions of xfsprogs and xfsdump, so I gave it a shot. I'm much less familiar with SUSE, but I managed to get a working minimal install that I tested against one of my SGI image files.

The entire VM .ova file is right at 200MB. Happy to share if someone has hosting suggestions.

[Raion]

What is a .ova indicating and what systems can it be used our of the box on?

[weblacky]

Turns out the very early version of Ubuntu don't support this. There are a few "expert" install options that you can fiddle with, but the core OS includes gnome and there is no way to preemptively remove it.

So, I did a but more digging and found that OpenSUSE 10.3 (still available here: https://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discon...o/torrent/) has similar versions of xfsprogs and xfsdump, so I gave it a shot. I'm much less familiar with SUSE, but I managed to get a working minimal install that I tested against one of my SGI image files.

The entire VM .ova file is right at 200MB. Happy to share if someone has hosting suggestions.

Right, I said Debian. Unbuntu is Debian-based but not Debian.   I’d recommend straight, vanilla, Debian for server work, it works and doesn’t bring the cruft with it.

[callahan]

What is a .ova indicating and what systems can it be used our of the box on?

.ova is the open virtual appliance, which can be run on most hypervisor applications. Of course this one has a x86 VM, so it would primarily be for Linux / MacOS / Windows. 

I can probably just throw it on archive.org, especially since this machine only contains FOSS software.

[Raion]

I'm thinking. I don't think putting it up on our FTP is a good idea because I'm currently facing some potential shutdown of that (while I prep a new server for Colo).

That being said, lemme think it over and I'll see what I can do to give you some space to just put up some helpful bits and bobs. How's that?

[robespierre]

The PCMCIA card seems to be the hard limit on bandwidth. I tried block sizes up to 4MB with no increase in performance. Larger blocks probably would work fine, but I like to stick with 512 byte block sizes 1) because I'm never fully sure how some of the archaic hardware will handle big blocks and 2) I regularly use SCIS2SD devices, which have a default block size of 512 bytes, so I don't have to do mental math to target the right sector.

PCMCIA I/O interfaces operate at roughly 3.3 MHz on a 16-bit data bus, for a bandwidth of 6.6 MB/s without pipelining. The interface is based on the AT bus with relaxed timing requirements (the AT bus ran originally at the CPU's clock frequency, but later on was commonly used at anywhere from 7 to 8.3 MHz). A SCSI PC Card should be able to saturate a 5 MB/s SCSI bus.

You didn't reply to or acknowledge my comment about cooked devices. The block size used in a write request can only influence the actual device transfer if the raw device is used (with an "r" in its file name). The cooked device always stores requests in the file cache and uses a scheduling policy to choose when to actually issue them and what block sizes to use. It's like the difference between writing to a TCP stream and sending a UDP datagram, only one offers control over the packet size to applications.

[jwhat]

Hi Callahan & Co,

this thread made me curious, as I have a desktop PC with Adaptec 2940 and original Fedora 1 (Yarrow) release installed on SCSI2SD disk. I use this to run the SGI L2 Emulator SW.

So I did a “man mount” and the page showed that xfs was an available mount option.

When I plugged an IRIX XFS disk into the machine and then tried to mount it, it failed, as the mount.xfs code was not installed (“mount -t xfs -o ro /dev/sdb1 /mnt/XFS” , where I got disk info from hardware browser util).
NOTE: I used read only option out of caution for my test.

Tried: "yum install xfsprogs" but this failed as there was no "xfsprogs" in the release 1 repository.

So I put a new SD card into the SCSI2SD unit and did a fresh install of Fedora Core 2 (Tettnang) from 2004, which is Linux 2.6 Kernel.

I had to update the Yum repository configuration: "/etc/yum.conf" to point to:
- "http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/"
- "http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/updates/$releasever/$basearch/"

Then did: "yum install xfsprogs"

This worked with Fedora 2, as xfs stuff is in repo.
So I am now able to mount physical XFS disk ok.

I deliberately used very old Fedora, as this is the release that Red Hat, who did initial XFS port used, rather than Debian based Linux.

Thanks for posting information.

Cheers from Oz,

jwhat/John

[Irixfanatic]

Hi Callahan!


Thank you for this super interesting post!