There are good linux distributions for console only x86 machines. I use voyage linux, which is a bit dated. Alpine linux is also a good choice, but a bit more difficult.
None of these have good support for serial port only devices. Fedora and Ubuntu take some tweaking to get them to pass real text to serial. Debian would probably work ok.
The biggest issue is they aren't designed for read-only partitions which is necessary for certain types of flash memory.
Love articles like this, and there's lots of good info here but...
"So, how do you get around installing an operating system on a computer which has no video output nor console redirection? For Windows and most Linux distros, you can’t"
Many NICs support PXE. You use bootp and TFTP to start a Linux installation. I've installed Linux on SPARC and Alpha this way (the MIPS machines had a form of video out), as well as on a Soekris.
The examples listed require the existence of a keyboard and screen. You would have to make or find a distro that used the serial console at boot. I think the whole point that the author was trying to make is that OpenBSD supports a serial console by default with the regular installation image.
IIRC Slackware at least also supports a serial console by default when installing (I used it to install Slackware on an Iomega NAS an old coworker of mine got rid of). Not sure about other distros.
You only need a keyboard and mouse unless you modify the boot media to use the serial console for the installer, which several of those links detail. To say that Linux doesn't support it is incredibly ignorant of the author.
The Linux kernel itself will use the serial console by default if there's no VGA device:
If no console device is specified, the first device found capable of
acting as a system console will be used. At this time, the system
first looks for a VGA card and then for a serial port. So if you don't
have a VGA card in your system the first serial port will automatically
become the console.
For most of these, changing syslinux.cfg in the install media lets you add the console=ttyS0 option to the kernel command line and whatever option triggers the text installer for the distro. So it isn't too hard to do, albeit annoyingly non default.
Reminds me of when I replaced Windows NT with Linux on a Dell NAS. Used extra PCI slot to slap in a SATA controller, then built an external hot swap array for off-site backups. A NAS and backups for less than $2K! (yeah it's not tape backup, meh)
I’m impressed that there are no leaking capacitors in the pictures on this post. I have a few late-90s-to-about-2005-era machines that are leaking capacitor juice all over their motherboards.
I rarely see the electrolyte get very far from the capacitor, so I’m guessing that it wouldn’t be an issue. Once it dries, it can be hard to remove, but since it rarely makes it far beyond the capacitor itself, I haven’t needed to wipe it up. I’m also a little afraid that using a wet paper towel might just spread the stuff further around and cause a short, but I’m not sure. The biggest issue could be the fact that the capacitor itself probably doesn’t work, which might be problematic if it’s in a PSU or similar.
Since the oldest hardware I have is from the mid-90s, I suspect the problem would be more pronounced in older machines and a re-capping job might be warranted then.
That depends on the chemistry of the electrolyte and the quality of the soldermask, but you'll rarely see more than superficial corrosion.
Batteries are a far bigger problem - most computers have a battery on the motherboard to power the real-time clock, which will do horrendous damage to the PCB if it leaks.
Oooo neat. Doesn't really factor into that particular OpenBSD deployment, but if I ever go back to OpenBSD on my work laptop (which I'd like to do at some point; the previous constraint was that I needed Linux for various tools at work, but I think I can make do with a second laptop and/or using vmm to run virtualized Linux X clients), then this looks like it'd be pretty handy (especially since my work network uses a captive portal now, so I'd want something smart enough to handle that, which sounds exactly like what unwind is supposed to achieve).
It’s the only OS on my primary laptop and desktop machine now! Everything feels well-engineered and mostly very consistent. Compared to Linux and FreeBSD, stuff like suspend/resume, brightness/volume hotkeys, etc. not only work, but work on the console and with a plain window manager (no desktop environment). The classic example is how Wi-Fi, even autojoining (as of recently), works without the mess of ifconfig+wpa_supplicant+NetworkManager. OpenBSD’s ifconfig supports all this without wrappers upon wrappers.
It’s still a very niche market, though, so you have to stick to relatively well-tested technologies to avoid running into inconsistencies and issues.
I use it as my primary laptop at home. And I have a laptop at work I use to test things on it.
I really like the lite-weight http server that comes with it. I've used it to complete a few internal only web sites for automating tasks around the office (importing data from other systems into our accounting system, firing off email confirmations to customers, etc.)
I have had very few issues with it and when I did it was generally me assuming I knew what I was doing because of my Linux experience. Once I learned to read the manual and look for subtle differences between BSD and GNU I found I was able to pick it all up pretty quick. Their manual pages are actually one of the best perks!
Yeah, I pretty much use it for all our internet services, except the ones where you need a large file system or the government / vendor is dictating what I can use. It works well, is pretty easy to upgrade every six months, and patching is a whole lot easier these days.
For the big file system I use FreeBSD with ZFS, and we have a VMWare server to hold all the evil I am required to keep in my server room. The fact I have some damn government vendor who hasn't validated their product on anything past Windows Server 2003 is a little annoying.
It's been my daily driver on desktop and laptop for eight years, and I've got a couple small servers running it for about six years. It just keeps getting better and more friendly as time goes on, too.
We would drive image the old Barracuda mail appliances.
The HD's would fail or the fans would get obscenely loud. You could run them in a whitebox server or VMware instance.
As an added bonus they were much, much faster.
Did the same thing with a CS-Mars SIEM, many moons ago. The only things that made it a Cisco appliance was the faceplate and a funky IDE-CF flash disk adapter
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[ 99.4 ms ] story [ 912 ms ] threadThe biggest issue is they aren't designed for read-only partitions which is necessary for certain types of flash memory.
"So, how do you get around installing an operating system on a computer which has no video output nor console redirection? For Windows and most Linux distros, you can’t"
Uh, no.
Red Hat Enterprise: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
Slackware: https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:serial_installati...
Debian: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch05s03.html.en
Ubuntu: https://clinta.github.io/bionic-on-apu2/
So basically every mainstream distro.
Uh, yes.
One example: https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/installing-debian-over...
Since the oldest hardware I have is from the mid-90s, I suspect the problem would be more pronounced in older machines and a re-capping job might be warranted then.
Batteries are a far bigger problem - most computers have a battery on the motherboard to power the real-time clock, which will do horrendous damage to the PCB if it leaks.
I've used it off-and-on it always felt prickly, even with the excellent documentation.
https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20190128061321
It’s still a very niche market, though, so you have to stick to relatively well-tested technologies to avoid running into inconsistencies and issues.
I really like the lite-weight http server that comes with it. I've used it to complete a few internal only web sites for automating tasks around the office (importing data from other systems into our accounting system, firing off email confirmations to customers, etc.)
I have had very few issues with it and when I did it was generally me assuming I knew what I was doing because of my Linux experience. Once I learned to read the manual and look for subtle differences between BSD and GNU I found I was able to pick it all up pretty quick. Their manual pages are actually one of the best perks!
For the big file system I use FreeBSD with ZFS, and we have a VMWare server to hold all the evil I am required to keep in my server room. The fact I have some damn government vendor who hasn't validated their product on anything past Windows Server 2003 is a little annoying.