Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: James <wireless@×××××××××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] quick installs on older/embedded hardware
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 19:17:08
Message-Id: loom.20140604T204249-435@post.gmane.org
1 Hello everybody,
2
3 I have a compliment of older x86 and amd64 boxes that I use for
4 testing things; new or specialized gentoo offerings and such. Mostly amd64.
5 Many of the older ide/ata drive systems have front loaded carriers
6 that have quick hot swap feature that make it easy to shut down
7 a machine. Swap the hardrive (and carrier cassette) and boot up
8 with a differnt OS for testing. Often I use one machine to work
9 on several differnet problems. I try to avoid the VM approach,
10 because much of what I work on involves actual hardware issues
11 and hardware verifications.
12
13 I could put a minimal distro, such as system rescure, on to a usb stick,
14 CD/DVD for booting, mount the drive and dd over complete images
15 from various places, then a quick reboot to test a drive based distro.
16
17 I have many differnt such gyrations ongoing and I need to deploy
18 a singular semanctic for boot a myriad of offering to test/code on.
19
20 To just name a few: pentoo, lilblue, lxqt(4), lxqt(5), wrt,
21 embedded gentoo etc etc etc. It seems as though each is a "walk_once"
22 exercise and I'm loosing my mind. Throw on top of this, BTRFS, CEPTh
23 gluster, xfs, zfs I'm beginning to become too fragmented to stay focused on
24 the task(s) at hand.
25
26 (Side rant)
27 If you read some of my (broken english) postings, they are mostly due to
28 hardware irritants that have the majoring of my limited brain cells
29 agitated to the point of illiteracy...... I use gmane (to post to
30 gentoo-user) and it use to have spell checking, or I hacked it, but, for
31 what ever reason, spellcheck in gmane seems to be gone now........
32
33 Anyway, I'd like to hear all of the ideas, including various disciplined
34 (structured) approaches I can take to minimize uniqueness in my lab and what
35 I'm currently doing (mostly). I also have usb sticks, but I've
36 found booting various offernings on usb, particularly older hardware, to
37 be too biosed_burdened.
38
39 Bear in mind, I also have dozens of embedded boards, some x86, but
40 mostly arm based, that are also in the mix. As soon as some less expensive
41 arm64 (aarch64) boards become available, those too will become much more
42 prevalent in my lab. I need some new organizational (software and Image)
43 ideas. My hardware is very well organied on large, open racks with
44 lots of UPS power and easy physical access to each box/board.
45
46 I'm also going to draw things up using (app-admin/rackview).
47 If/when I can take my network security to the next level,
48 I'd like to open up 1/2 of the machines to the gentoo community
49 for testing and debug on actual hardware. A portal to actuall hardware
50 resources. I basically need the ability to move around complete
51 system images between differment boxes.
52
53
54 thoughts and comments are most welcome!
55
56 James

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] quick installs on older/embedded hardware Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>
Re: [gentoo-user] quick installs on older/embedded hardware Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>