[BlueOnyx:11665] Re: HowTo upgrade Cobalt RaQ3 and RaQ4 to BlueOnyx 5106R on CentOS 5.8

[George F. Nemeyer]

On Tue, 6 Nov 2012, David Thacker wrote:

Thanks for posting this!  Some time back, I managed to get a RAQ 550
upgraded to Blue Onyx using the original instructions you referenced, as
well as other bits and pieces of info I found online.  It works fine in
the basics, though some of the hardware monitoring functions aren't quite
right still.

But I also have a couple of RAQ 4 boxes that I've been wanting to do as
well.  They currently have RackStar or Blue Quartz on them.

I knew the kernel for Centos 5.8 needed the i686 CPU, but wasn't sure if
the install *packages*, though labled i386, did as well.  From the
labeling, you'd likely assume not, but later distros like Scientific Linux
still use i386 for the package architecture designations, though
everything's compiled from source using the i686 instruction set!  So some
things *might* work, but others will surely break since there's a handfull
of CPU instructions in the 686 that the K6-III 586 in the RAQs don't have.
Very misleading and annoying!

I've not seen any definitive statement regarding whether RedHat/Centos
i386 actually means what it implies for anything after Centos 4.9, though
5.x definitely *does* supply only a i686 kernel, and labels it as such.

For that reason, I updated the StrongBolt RAQ 4s to Centos 4.9 (Fedora 4
for RackStars), and stopped there.  I did try a Centos 5.x update which
broke a lot of things but on that attempt, I'd started with a full
StrongBolt install including BQ.  I'd not had time to try the 'bare bones
start' approach I later used for the 550, but wasn't optomistic about the
likely result.  If it's worked for you, I'll definately give it a shot!

> Of course, while the BlueOnyx software is fully modern, actively
> maintained and up to date, the Cobalt RaQ hardware is definitely old and
> tired and a wee bit slow. Still, they're at least useful for simple
> hosting or backup tasks.

The age makes little difference for many uses, and you can't match the 30
watt power consumption of the RAQ 3/4 boxes.  You can run 3 of them for
what it would take to keep a 100 watt light bulb on!

> I started with George (aka Mr. Webcam) Hall's instructions for upgrading
> the RaQ550s to BX, but found there were some differences for the older
> RaQ3 & RaQ4 machines, primarily the difference between the i586 platform
> vs i686. Anyway, with a fair bit of searching, testing, and patience I was
> ultimately successful. I've written up the whole process, in case anyone
> else wants to try the same thing.
>
> http://www.thackernet.com/RaQtoBX/RAQ34_to_BlueOnyx.html

One of the problems with the switch is indeed the kernel.  What I did on
the ones I have is to compile my own 2.6.20 (.27 for 550) kernel using
Cobalt RAQ support patches available from the net.  I first used the old
StrongBolt kernel, but it wasn't (properly) compiled to support NFS (it
had the NFS support burned in, and not as a module, which caused some of
the other packages that wanted to load a module to fail since they looked
for the module file being present).  I also included support for more
types of filesystems (like iso9660 and MS), and potential hardware like
some ethernet and wireless cards for the PCI slot, and USB.

In addition to the custom kernel, I managed to cobble support for the
BQ/BX visual "Disk Integrity" image, and created a gif image for the RAQ 4
layout.  The drives now properly show their status during RAID updates.
Also got the 'Temperature' status to work (which, for the RAQ 4, uses the
/proc/cobalt/ data of the patched kernels).  Getting saualito to display
things was done by transplanting some of the sausalito Active Monitor
files from either StrongBolt, RackStar, or original Cobalt sources.

I also put in a lot of 'lcd-write' statements into the various service
scripts so you can watch the boot process as it goes along.

Sadly, much of the LCD and Cobalt-unique support has been stripped from
BQ, and even BX, which target more generic PC-desktop hardware.  This is a
shame, since, as you noted, the RAQs are still useful, and Centos 5 will
have formal support until 2014...and should remain useable for some years
after.  I wish I had the programming skills to actually and properly build
the RAQ support back into BX with some 'if RAQ' kinds of statements.

I'd be happy to work with you to incorporate info on what I've found/done
into your document.  I made some notes for myself as I went along, though
a lot was the sort of shot-in-the-dark kinds of approach, especially at
first.  As a non-programmer, Sausalio is still largely a mystery and
unfathomable, but maybe with help from here, we can come up with a really
nice solution that will breathe new life into the RAQs.

It would be *really* great if we could come up with a BX-RAQ one-shot
iso-sort of Blue Onyx core update package now that StrongBolt, RackStar
and original Cobalt sources have all dried up.

=^_^=  Tigerwolf