If you’ve been following along with my wifi radio posts, you may recall my problem of storage for the platform. I chose an ultra-low power and nearly zero storage device for my music collection because I planned to buy an external storage device and serve music from that device. I still think that’s a good idea, but I’m too cheap to spring for the kind of device I really want. So I’ve been experimenting with cloud storage which has a number of big advantages which I won’t get into here.

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My first large foray into the world of GNU/Linux was with a tutorial for replacing a machine’s operating system (RHEL) with Debian over SSH. I was successful even though I had no idea what I was doing, and since then I’ve done a lot of my learning this way. One thing I’ve picked up through reading tutorials is the varying styles of batch file manipulation. Often times, you’ll see something like this magic:

for i in *.example; do cp $i|sed s/.example/.ini/; done

Anyone who’s familiar with shell scripting will know what that does almost instantly, but beginners reading along probably won’t. Often times the tutorial author is using this command for copying 3 or 4 files and provides no explanation for what’s actually happening. This makes it seem less useful for doing actual work, and more useful for just showing off cheap bash scripting tricks. I’m guilty of doing this too occasionally.

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Now that we have our fancy new VPS and are allowed to create multiple user accounts, I’ve run into a problem with basic linux permissions that you really only find when you have multiple users working in the same space. In my case, we need multiple users to have access to all of our online property web roots. I started by using chown to force the entire web root under the ownership of www-data:www-data and adding everyone who needed access to the secondary www-data group. This works fine until people start making changes. Each new file they write becomes owned by only them and their primary group.

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Finding a good, cheap sound card should have been as easy as ordering the one mentioned on the mighty ohm for $10, but I thought I’d save eight bucks and order the cheapest possible one on ebay. When it arrived, the right channel was totally non-functional and to say the sound quality was poor would be an understatement. It was impressive though, that anyone could manufacture and deliver to my door a brand new USB sound card even counting the defects for only two dollars. But that’s all beside the point.

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Recently I inherited a Sun Microsystems SunFire v240. This thing burns hot and loud (hence the name), quite a lot of fun. After plugging in a console cable and booting up the system, I was met with a very nice surprise on specs.

Sun Fire V240, No Keyboard
Copyright 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
OpenBoot 4.22.33, 8192 MB memory installed, Serial #58631225.
Ethernet address 0:3:ba:7e:a4:39, Host ID: 837ea439.

Pretty well-specced-out for a hand-me-down. Unfortunately, I don’t know the first thing about working with SunOS. It took me a while to even get the network up. Apparently, the network interface must be “plumbed” before it will work. I’m sure Sun makes a great operating system, but I didn’t want to waste my time learning how to use it. My first thought, of course, was to install Ubuntu, but it looks like Ubuntu dropped support for Sparc somewhere around Gutsy Gibbon. Debian on the other hand, still fully supports Sparc and UltraSparc 64. Looks like I found a match.

After logging in, I hit “init 0” to drop down to standby mode and got the ok> prompt. My options for booting were limited to CD-ROM and network, but actually just network because this SunFire wasn’t equipped with a CD-ROM drive. It took me a while to read through relevant documentation. Most of the instructions that I’d found required me to set up a DHCP or BOOTP server, RARP services, a TFTP server, and then use a magical filename for a boot image. I tried that for a while, but had no luck.

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