Wed Dec 5 00:23:35 PST 2001

Well, with a bit of quick messing about in the early morning hours, I got the DC outputting VGA (you have to plug the connector in all the way) and also talking on the serial port. The DC is most certainly leaving a full console on the serial port, so now I need to go read up on pppd and getty to figure out how to set up both linux machines to talk pppd to each other and then NFS or Samba mount the servers drives on the DC. Should be interesting, but unfortunately, I’m not likely to have much time to work on it this week.

Wed Dec 5 23:23:32 PST 2001

OK, so I figure out that I need to edit /etc/inittab and run telinit Q to get init to reread the file to disable the login on the serial port. That’s not so bad at all. So then when I run pppd, it tells me that I need to do a mknod /dev/ppp c 108 0 which works fine. So I run pppd again, and it turns out that while they included pppd in the distribution, they didn’t bother to compile ppp support into the kernel, making the pppd binary completely useless.

Fortunately, I’ve already got a gcc cross compiler built (I think, it didn’t want to compile distributed.net’s client, but that’s another story.) So recompiling the kernel with ppp support isn’t too bad, but I will have to burn a new CD. But at this point, I’m thinking that it’s time to boot 4×4 Evolution and race trucks around on the DC and then get some sleep. Compiling a new kernel can wait till tommorow. The kernel compiles pretty quick on a 1GHz P3 :-)