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Hacking Oracle's $199 Net Appliance
RegardsSJ writes "I've documented my progress in hacking around with Larry E's $199 ThinkNIC box. It has great possibilities for use as various network appliances. My site describes what it is, what's inside, how to add a hard drive, and how to customize and burn a new system CD. "
These things have been hacked all up and down already, and this is one of the most content-poor accounts I have seen. Here are some better resources:
I've gotten one of these myself (littlelarry.capnbry.net, currently offline), pulled it apart, soldered another power connector on, and added a hard drive. The Cyrix PR266 is pretty underpowered, but it runs linux like a scalded dog.
BryIt arrived via a unmarked paper box. Little did the UPS guy know what I was going do.
I quickly rushed it up to my lab and tore open the box. Inside was a smaller box marked system board.
I was confused. A system board?? I hadn't heard of these. I tore open this new box and was able to gaze upon my quary. Damn! It looked just like a motherboard!!!!
This 'system board' had a number of cryptically labelled connectors: IDE1, BANK1, SPKR. Only through my years of experience and hackerly knowledge would I even begin to discern what these cryptic labels meant. Perhaps these were just a rouse. After the iOpener incent, these hardware manufacturers were rumoured to mislabel items to prevent master hacker like me from repurposing their devices.
Straight out of the box this thing wouldn't even boot Linux. I carefully set the CD at various locations and nothing. No light, no sound. It took more than a week of work to get a booting system. I used all my industry connections to get the extra pieces of hardware I would need. Through a dealer in Chinatown I obtained a 'Slot 1 Coppermine'. Through a company in Cleveland, run by Russian immigrants, I obtained PC133 SDRAM modules. Surfing the web I found this thing used a standard ATX power supply. The fools! You can get those anywhere!
So it was a week later and I finally had a booting system. Now, could I install linux?
I took the old RH6.2 disk I had burned 6 months earlier and gingerly placed it in a salvage CD-ROM drive I found in the dumpster of a local high-tech company. It worked! First try!!!
I quickly had root and the system was mine. Now all i need to do is build an enclosure for this thing and I've turned this 'system board' into a full working Linux box.
While my skillz are probably beyond those most of you posses, never fear. I'll be putting up a web site on Geocities to help you lusers transform the Tyan 'system board' into a working Linutz box.
I was a very early adopter of the I-opener (still have my hacked one sitting here collecting dust from non-use; was more fun to hack than actually use) and I also just got a tivo and hacked it as well.
but the book-pc is a real pc with no need to "break in" to it. it has onboard video (both composite/s-video AND svga outs), onboard digital audio sound (real spdif digital in,out via the uber-cool cmi8738 chip), onboard 10/100, usual ide and floppy, 2 usb, 1 printer and modem. only thing missing is serial and you can steal the modem port for that (still looking for pinouts on that header, though).
its $179 for a barebones system (add cpu ram and hard drive). I threw the installed cdrom drive away since its junk and added a 2nd hard drive in its space. makes a most excellent mp3 player. with the 60gig's of storage I have on there and an external audio alchemy DAC connected to the spdif out, you get sound quality that is truly cd or better (better since you control the audio circuitry via which DAC you buy and connect).
you can get a socket-7 version (what I bought) which uses the mvp4 chipset (very standard) or you can get the [cough] i810 set and futz with the agp port a bit to get video/X11 working. I didn't have a cel370 chip sitting around and I did have a k6-3 being unused so I ordered the socket7 version ($15 more). didn't regret it - X came up pretty easily.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."