Recently, I bought a GuruPlug Plus specifically for use as a router. I wanted to use less watts than a desktop machine, but have a little more power to run applications than on my favorite commercial-router-firmware, Tomato. So when the dual-interface GuruPlugs came out, I bought one.
Lesson one: buy the JTAG board too if you are going to mess around with the kernel, or in any way render the thing unbootable. Unlike its predecessor the SheevaPlug, the GuruPlug does not have debugging built in, so you’ll need to buy the JTAG board to debug the boot process.
Lesson two: The PlugComputer wiki and forums are invaluable. I also used this guy’s notes for help with the Debian setup.
The UPS in question: a F6B\C900-UNV.
I used to use the Bulldog Plus (3.01.18) software, but since my upgrade of this particular machine to Debian Lenny, the upsd process started taking up 30% CPU all the time.
Getting it to work with nut is easy! You just need the magic.
I’m sick this weekend and don’t feel like writing much, so I’ll be brief. I’ll be doing a fresh install of Debian Squeeze (currently testing), found here, because my old install is getting broken, and I want to write down how I get things working on my Thinkpad R61 this time, both for myself and Google. I have a full-disk backup on my UltraBay hard drive. I’ll be going with the x64 version this time, and will be installing Lenny first, then upgrading, because I already have a Lenny CD, the torrent of the weekly squeeze images is unregistered, jigdo tells me “Aaargh – 0 files could not be downloaded. This should not happen!”, and HTTP goes at 50KB/s. I’ll limit this to Thinkpad-specific things.
Install: No issue. I chose to do it wired rather than load iwlwifi at install time.
Video: worked fine out of the box with the Intel driver.
So Lenny broke my old UPS monitoring software (Opti-UPS does not play well with Linux anyway, and now it’s segfaulting), and as the UPS was a few years old anyway I grabbed a deal (free shipping!) on a new one from Newegg. I got an APC BE550G.
Step 1:
sudo aptitude install apcupsd apcupsd-cgi
Step 2: Edit /etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf. Mine is connected via USB, so it was easy, I just had to change:
…. so it turns out the crucial piece I was missing for ipv6 support on my LAN was to enable ipv6 on my desktop. Whoops, XP doesn’t have it on by default (go to a NIC’s Properties and click Install).
Since I had 99% of this set up before (ipv6 from the router was fine, just not behind it), this won’t be a step-by-step howto, but I want to write down how I think I go it. Don’t take me word-for-word, read the docs because that what I’d have to do if I ever did this again.
First up: Get ipv6 somehow. I got a tunnel from Hurricane Electric, so that’s how mine is set up.
Well Debian 5.0 is finally out. And like it’s Christmas day, it’s time to upgrade one of my servers :). I specifically want the ipv6 support that Shorewall has for kernels > 2.6.25. My starting point may be a little odd because I have been running stable/testing for some packages, but I’m going to fix that right now.
As always:
- Take a backup
- Test the backup
- Read the release notes
Then proceed: