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Linux In A Box
Henrik pointed us to the Linux in a Box project, which is a bitchin' little project to create an inexpensive little Linux box: it boots a 2.0.36 kernel from a ramdisk, and it's pingable and Telenetable, as well as being usable as a Web server. Only for the brave of heart and willing to hack.
Well, if we can do a Bridge/Firewall with it, it will be really cool.
- The Sigless Wonder
Not to worry though the lovely people seem to have cached it on this url.
Not sure how up to date it is though.
funny munging
If i could fit in in a Spam tin, then it could be the world's smallest open relay mail server :)
Please stop using these nasty words on Slashdot. Sites like this that are child-accessible should know to restrain their content in the face of pending laws. How many times does it need to be told to people that content that is offensive to children needs to be kept away from them?
it boots a 2.0.36 kernel
On top of that, you go and influence these poor suggestable little children with thoughts of running an outdated kernel that is simply a security hole! How do you even dare? Would you allow your children to use NT3.5? Would you allow them to use an outdated kernel? Think, Taco, what about the children?
it's pingable and Telenetable, as well as being usable as a Web server. Only for the brave of heart and willing to hack.
I think you meant willing to be hacked. Once again, what about the children? Would you let your child use telnet? Why suggest it to the children on Slashdot? You should know better than that. As a maintainer of a website like this, you have a responsibility to not influence suggestible little children with Nazi ideas such as running Telnet on a computer.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
It's always good to hear about more projects to miniturize Linux and personal computers, but what is the use of a small little box with no keyboard? Am I supposed to telepathically communicate with the box (although that would be kinda cool). I am really waiting for: Linux in a pin head, or having Linux run in a 1-inch by 1-inch by 4 millimeters hand watch.
That'll teach them to run a webserver from an embedded processor!
/. ing.
I guess its the sort of webserver i'd like to have on my toaster so I didn't have to get up to check how brown my toast was but i'd like to think my toaster would be exempt from
I cannot read the site (already /. 'ed?) but from the heading it sound like the lpr linux router from a flop project.
Prettier box too.
Linux already does run on a watch. Check it out. (actually, the OS is running out of site and the display is on the watch)
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Here is a story on Yahoo's daily news about IBM prototyping a wristwatch running Linux. It uses some wireless technology to communicate with other computers (no, there's not a dinky little 101 key keyboard with keys so small that philosophers can argue about how many angels can dance on them). The article says they're not planning on commecializing it though...
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
This is a simple distro (free!) that gets you up and running on a low-end system w/o a hard drive.
Get your Floppy Firewall at http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw.
If it don't have what you want, you can always add more. But, if you add too much, you might have to add a hard drive.
Fight Spammers!
Oh wait -- does anyone remember this Linux server in a box? You also might be able to get Linux in a box at this site.
Be sure to check out:
There are simply not enough things that come in boxes. Just think how shameful it is for all that fruit to be sitting out there naked in the produce section at the grocery store...
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
I for one, being an SA and amateur programmer,
would like building block systems. It would be
great to be able to buy systems for $300 - $400
that could be chained together to experiment with
distributed computing. The small and quiet are
for my studio apartment. If I had resources like
this, I could play with clusters and agents or
CODA. Anyone remember the Ergo brick? This is
what we need. Even better, computing could come
transmeta "slices". How cheap would a webpad be
if it had no LCD? Need more power in your cluster?
Just plug another slice into your cluster cabinet.
How small would a webpad be without display? You
could have a VCR sized chassis with 8 machines in
it.
-Dave
Firewalls/Routers
Vanity Web Servers - Set up your family photos
Small Workgroup Servers
Intranet Servers (Internal Project Pages)
"Whiteboard" servers
CVS Servers
Basically anything that requires a cheap, small, server without a high load.
"My karma hasn't changed it all. According to Rob, that's on purpose."
To help you in your quest for lower karma, please post the email where Rob claimed this.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
anything like "Linux for Dummies" -- which comes in a box?
I do not have a signature
...so what's the big deal??
Hey! It wasn't redundant when I clicked 'reply'... *sheesh*...those moderators... ;-)
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I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
I just boughta cheap ($129 us dollars) box the other day from egghead.com... it's basically a 200mhz, 64MB RAM, diskless box with linux on a 16MB flash rom. It's a kick-ass little box, perfectly setup to be a webserver, etc... How much cheaper does the "Linux in a box" project need to get? Is $129 enough? If so, contact fujitsu, the MFG of this box.
--cr@ckwhore
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Free your Linux from the bottle. Linux has no need of earthly constraints. Think "Linux outside the box". Join our project: LITA ("Linux In The Air" or "LITA's In The Air")
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
if /. bothers to *warn* a website they are about to go doooooown..
uuuggggghhhh
You know those isolinear chips from Star Trek TNG? Yeah! Have a main system that can take hundreds or thousands of smaller modules. A module could be a processor or hard-drive, service provider, whatever.
Need more space? plug in a harddrive module.
Need more processing? plug in a processor module.
The idea would be that everything is hot-swappable and come to life as soon as you've plugged it in.
(note that the modules don't have to be the size of the isolinear chips... its the idea tho).
You know what the biggest problem would be? Nine months after you've setup this system in your company, someone will create a new protocol and make the one you're using obsolete.. sigh.
;-)
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Can you run it on a box?
And see how fast it overclocks?
Can you run it on a toaster?
Or run it on a roller coaster?
Can you run it on your phone?
And call your kernel far from home?
Can you run it on your watch?
Or pour some hot grits on your crotch?
Since the article is too /.'ed for anyone to read, I can only speculate. I have no idea why this linux box is so exciting, I picked up a couple pentium boxen cheap at a goverment auction ($30/box, 16MB RAM, 850MB HD) and I have linux running in a box. Ok, several boxen. Maybe this machine is cheap, but how can it be as cheap as $30/box? Plus I have the ability to expand it out, and well, now you know my opinion.
I grep, therefore I am
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
The procedure for making the EPROMS for the RTD PC-104 card is as follows:
- Fire up the card with +5 and 12 volts
- Create a freshly formatted floppy with the included Datalight DOS 5.0 on it. I know, it's sad but we had some DOS setup code for the card.
- Drop loadlin and the kernal You DID build a baby size kernal for this with initrd right? on the floppy
- Create a ramdisk on you development system to build the root image for your new card
- umount the ramdisk
- Set the ramdisk to zeros with:
- Make a filesystem
/dev/ram0 4096
- Mount the ramdisk and copy your root filesystem in:
/dev/ram0 /mnt
/projects/snmp/root_fs/* /mnt
- unmount it again and squish it down with:
/mnt
/projects/snmp/eprom/root_fs.gz
- Now, use sneaker net to move the floppy to the DOS machine running the RTD supplied EPROM image maker and tell it to make the entire floppy into an EPROM image
.BIN file(s)
- Burn the files into EPROM, plug 'em into the card, apply power and open a beer as you watch Linux boot on a 4 inch card
Have fun.dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ram0 count=4096
mke2fs -vm0
mount -t ext2
cp -pxR
umount
dd if=/dev/ram0 bs=1k count=4096 | gzip -v9 >
BTW, even though the parent is at 0, my karma is still at 113 (at least it claims to be...)
Imagine being able to snap together a Beowulf cluster. Run out of disk space, just snap on another RAID brick. Best of all, with the mindstorm attachments, you can watch the system upgrade itself when it needs more resources.
Just don't let your system have a credit card number or you may find it taking over your apartment today, and the world tomorrow....
--
could I suggest, that when the next big batch of cash comes in, slashdot expands by running all appropriate links for the last two days though a slashdot run cache system?
I propose, somewhat jokingly, that we call this feature cachedot
-Daniel
For those enterprising and lucky enough to find such things:
:)
I found at a computer show a HP Vectra 486/66 desktop system w/8MB Ram, 400MB HD, embedded SVGA and sound for only $17.00. Add to that 2 ISA 10baseT network cards that I got for $1.25 bringing the total cost to $19.50.
I then did a network install of RH 6.1 - as mimimum as I could (about 125Mb) and poof - firewall, NAT server for a cable modem.
I plan on selling it to a cable modem using friend for a bit more than cost
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
If you have any intention of selling really lots of those units, you need to change your bootup, loading and configuration procedure rather drastically to:
STEP 1: Connect unit to LAN through RJ45, apply power.
STEP 2: Unit discovers all local networking parameters by snooping, configures itself as a webserver on an unused address of the subnet (snoop to see its advertisement), and everything else is configured up through a browser.
STEP 3: There is no step 3, because *everything* should be programmable in step 2, including uploading kernels to onboard flash.
Yes, I know that the reason PC-104 cards tend to be as dumb and old-fashioned as they were 5 years ago is because in theory every extra facility adds a fractional cost to the product, but I can't help feel that the accountants aren't factoring in the cost of people's time, nor the likelihood of increased sales if the item is massively easy to use.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If only i spoke danish :) I do...
It's 10x16 centimeters, so 4x6 inches is close enough.
Off my head it costs $250 for parts - some (as in all) assembly required. A few days ago I inquired about a price for an assembled system, but I have yet to get an answer. Will probably be a while now that they got /.'ed.
If you're into in-a-box stuff, like at what the CSimm (no affiliations) does. It's smaller (the whole darn thing fits in an old-style 30 pin ram-socket). Just bought two of those for running CLinux. They're pretty little Motorola Dragonballs (also powers the PalmPilot V series) with 8 Megs of RAM and 2 Megs of Flash and an ehternet chip. No sleep for me now :-)
Black holes are where God divided by zero
I might have not searched very well but when i was looking for something like this that supported and modem and dialup ppp, i couldnt find it, so i just install a small customized slack install on a old 486, with the floppy distros you sure cant have you php enabled webserver and ssh ;)
Furthermore, it is not at all unlikely that something of 80386 vintage will seriously suck both for the purposes of servicing the LAN as well as for servicing a modem. On my newer (long retired) 80486 box, the UART couldn't cope well with a 28K modem; getting hardware for that now is liable to be a chore. Similar will be true for Ethernet; being limited to 10Base2 wouldn't kill me, as I use it to hook up my laptop, but a slow ISA card may actually hurt throughput.
I don't think this combo would work out terribly well to service a DSL or Cable Modem connection...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
If LIAB was hosting that site, may god have mercy on it's silicon soul.
RIP http://www.liab.dk/
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Oh - and did I mention you program it in Java - it has it's own virtual machine on board. Plus stacks of I/O - 4 serial, 1-wire, CAN, SBX, I2C, ethernet, parallel, etc. And all for only $50US
I'm using one for my final year project, and they are very cool.
- Lindsay
http://www.linux-hacker.net/imod/imod.ht ml
Doesn't this kinda resemble PicoBSD a little bit? You all remember - a lightweight FreeBSD-3.0 kernel & tiny compressed MFS filesystem & drivers for several ethernet cards & slip/ppp* & routed* on a floppy? :)
Am I going to be given a (0, flamebait) for this post?
*-depends on what version you downloaded.
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
That's a different beast, though. All of the firewalling code relies on routing. A packet exists on one subnet (on one interface), and if certain conditions are met, it will be passed through to another subnet (on the other interface). This is great, but I think it would be better if this could be done with a bridge instead of a router. A company with a class A/B/C network has to split their net into multiple subnets for a router-based firewall to work, but not for a bridge-based firewall.
For some info on this technique, check out This link.
Since a bridge looks like a wire to the outside world (it has no effect on the topology of the network), a potential intruder won't know whether their packet has hit a firewall or not. A bridge that rejects a packet looks like the target machine (behind the firewall) is physically disconnected from the network. A traceroute won't identify the firewall (since the packets don't have to go through an IP "interface"), so that makes it harder for someone to figure out what machine to target for an attack.
I think that some of this functionality is available in the new 2.4x kernels, since they have disconnected the ethernet interfaces from the IP addresses (for other reasons). (This HOWTO has info on bridge/firewalling)
The next thing to do is to actually give a bridge an IP address - the same address for either NIC. You'd still have to know which "side" a packet comes from, for the firewalling to work. Once you have this setup, you can contact the machine (if you know its' address), but it doesn't show up if you try to contact something beyond it. Additionally, you can do things like have remote users (whose IP addresses change each time they dial in) use your SMTP/FTP/whatever boxes by authenticating to the brigde/firewall, and having the authentication script add a temporary IPChains-like entry for the dynamic address. That fixes a lot of the problems with spammers using relay hosts. (yes, this sounds a lot like a slightly modified proxy server)
Maybe this is a good separate topic for discussion on /.
- The Sigless Wonder
http://www.linuxrouter.org/
We've been doing this since 1996.
There are people that still find telnet to be a semi-useful service?
Jason
I, Mikael Dich, the designer of the Linux In A Box microprocessor board, is pleased that the LIAB project has come up on www.slashdot.com! http://www.liab.dk has broken down due to the heavy load, so here is a little information:
The board uses i386EX at 25 MHz, 4 Mbyte of FLASH, up to 64 Mbyte of DRAM (72 pin), 10BASE-T, runs on 9-24V DC or AC, 8 watt, 150 grams, 4*6 inches.
I am cofounder of the company "LIAB Electronics I/S" which produces and sells assembled LIAB microprocessor boards. We deliver these boards complete with a CD-ROM, a Users Manual and a Hardware Reference. Price approx. $300. The CD-ROM contains all documentation, including sources for the bootloader, kernel patches, images for an inital ramdisc, schematics and plot files for the PCB. This documentation is free and everybody is free to manufacture their own LIABs. You may change the design and use it as you want. You may download pdf versions of the (draft) Users Manual and Hardware Reference on http://www.liab.dk
The LIAB board now runs both version 2.0.36 and 2.2.14 of the Linux kernel. At least ten different extension boards have been designed for the 64 pins I/O connector: a 12 bit A/D card, a relay/optoisolated I/O card, an MP3 player using the STA013 MP3 decoder chip, an IDE harddisk interface, an HPIB interface and a floppy interface. We are working on an simple USB host interface these days. The board is considere ideal for educational purposes.
Mikael Dich, midi@www.liab.dk
phpGroupWare
until (succeed) try { again(); }
until (succeed) try { again(); }
That's why I made a free firewall that runs off hard disk - sure, it can be done from floppy, but I consider them too failure prone...
-John
What about us poor folk with sub +1 bonus karma? Do the normal folks still have variable karma?
Yup - but if you're user #7423, why don't you have the bonus? Anyway, if you whore yourself up to 50 points, then your karma gets stuck.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
it amazes me that you have no idea what communism is. read/learn/listen before you talk
-thinkpol