Hello all.

First of all, I’m not feeling well and for that you all must suffer. I’ve been coming down with what feels like the beginning of food poisoning for 2 days, though it’s probably not.

Progress with Asterisk at work. For weeks the phones have been playing up. Can call from one to the other but not vice versa. Adding a third phone means that phone #2 now works, but phone #3 can’t call etc. Weird stuff. Today I looked into the config and found a section for the extension configured at phone #3 which says exactly the error I was getting, so I commented it out and hey presto – 3 working phone extentions. I really like playing with Asterisk, I’m using Asterisk@Home as I’m an Asterisk virgin and I don’t have time to read the whole book to be able to compile and configure it by hand, but it does have a lot of weird issues.

There is also more progress at home. I have pretty much finished my mail system. As I’ve been mentioning for some time, I’m using Vexim as the base and putting a few extra things in, like webmail, whitelisting, blacklisting and so on, nothing outrageous, just a featureful system. This project has been dragging on since January or thereabouts, but I haven’t had much time to work on it and it’s had some false starts. I frigged with Fedora for a few weeks before going back to Debian, then frigged with Courier for 2 or 3 weeks, trying to get it to authenticate against MySQL, but with full debugging on, the log files said the right thing but it wouldn’t let me in, even with the config copied from a working setup. In the end, I swapped it for Dovecot and I had it up about an hour without any experience of configuring it. I will have to decide soon whether I will stay with Yahoo, move to Gmail or use my own server. It was really just a ‘doing it for the sake of it’ exercise, but the moment of truth will soon be upon me. I have to admit, I like the idea of myname@adamsweet.org.

Next bit of movement is in the Alpha stakes. Sparkes gave me a Digital Alpha Server 800 5/400 back in October and I had a go at trying to install Debian on it but didn’t know what I was doing and couldn’t get it to boot from the CD. A bit of idle browsing today told me what I needed to know and I have managed to install Debian successfully, it’s apt-get updating as we speak. Nice one 🙂

For any googlers out there, I used this thread. I had to use the SRM console to boot from a Sarge CD, not the Alpha BIOS though that is possible I believe from a Woody disk. I also installed Woody (using the SRM console) and did a dist-upgrade to Sarge. If you get the Alpha BIOS, there is a setting in there to use the SRM console, which is a blue screen, rather than Alpha BIOS’s white one. I used show dev to show the devices and then picked at the ‘dka’ ones until it booted, using the boot devicename where devicename was the name of the device listed by show map. My cdrom was something like dka400.4.0.5.0 and the hard disk was dka200.2.0.5.0, so the command was

boot dka400.4.0.5.0

When the minimal system is installed and the installer reboots, you have to interrupt the boot process at the SRM console again and change the boot device to dka200.2.0.5.0 to boot from the hard disk as the SRM console remembers your boot device. Subsequent reboots will therefore obviously not require you to change the boot device unless you want to boot from the CDROM again.

Other points to note include that you have to make BSD disk labels rather than DOS partitions for an SRM console boot and your first BSD label should start on the 2nd disk cylinder not the first as per the default, to leave room for the bootloader. Installing straight from a Sarge CD will bypass all this disk label and cylinder nonsense as the partitioner will do it all for you, but if you only have an Alpha BIOS, then you will have to install Woody and then upgrade to Sarge as the Alpha BIOS booting routine isn’t supported by the Sarge installer.

Not sure what I’m going to do with it yet, again, it was more an experiment than any purposeful exercise, but I like the idea of installing Linux on pretty much anything I can get my hands on. I have x86s, PPCs, a Sun Sparc Ultra 10 and now a Digital Alpha. I am also silently hoping to lay my hands on an SGI Mips machine, but we’ll have to be patient there. If you have any redundant hardware that Debian has been ported to then I’m your man, I don’t believe I have PA-RISC, m86k or arm machines, I don’t have a mips yet and well, I doubt anyone is going to give away an Itanuim box or an IBM S/390, but if you need to you only have to call…

So thats that for now. New car is due in the next week or two. Over and out.