IPCop on the Omnibook 800CT

I had planned to convert a couple of my Omnibook 800's into a firewall and a NAS respectively since they are low power and built like brick-privys.  Herewith are my firewall experiences...

I've been using IPCop for a while although activity and progress towards V2.0 has kind of dropped off, it still works for me though the loss of Snort support is a little annoying.  It is the rear facing side of a dual-bastion configuration so the forward 'wall takes most of the crud.

In any case, something a little more elderly might help since it only has 32MB RAM and a P133 to run on.

First off, unlike Damn Small Linux the IPCop boot floppy can't see my PCMCIA CDROM drive so it's back to my Omnibook CDROM drive. Unfortunately I don't have a power cable so I have to feed it AA batteries which it consumes at a prodigious rate - hooray for rechargeables.

I have scored a couple of Xircom 10/100 Ethernet/56K modem PCMCIA (not Cardbus) cards off eBay which seem to supported by IPCop so we are good to go. In order to fit both cards in, I need dongled ethernet cards rather than the fat cards that seem prevalent today. 

Boot from floppy (get an image from the IPCop CD) proceeds until it tries to load the additional drivers from floppy. It appears that the IPCop 1.4.20 CD has a corrupt drivers floppy image so I backtrack to 1.4.10 for no particular reason.

Boot from floppy and loading the drivers floppy then works...until it discovers the 128MB CF (in a CF/2.5-inch hdd adapter) for /dev/harddisk1 which is apparently too small. A quick raid on my digital camera scores a Kingston 1GB CF which solves the problem. Other than that the install goes smoothly.

...Until I bring IPCop up - when I discover that the GREEN network is fine but the RED does not function. The dongle lights up to indicate a 100MB connection and flashes to show traffic but I can't ping the front firewall or, indeed, reach it in any way. Hmmm.

After a bit of digging around gets me to /proc/interrupts which indicates that the RED PCMCIA card is sharing an interrupt , IRQ 9, with something else whereas the GREEN is not. It all comes back now, back in the days before ACPI and all that fancy stuff when we had to worry about IRQ's.

A reboot and F2 press later, I have disabled the serial port on the Omnibook thereby freeing up IRQ 4. This now needs to be pressed into service for the RED Xircom instead of IRQ 9. A quick visit to /etc/pcmcia/config.opts allows me to disable IRQ 9 and enable IRQ 4 for PCMCIA and a further reboot later (this is getting like a Windows install!) all is well and I have an operational firewall. A flurry of patches later, I now have a reasonably up-to-date firewall.

One other thing, I note that the screen blanker on IPCop does not power down the backlight. Fortunately, pressing the on/off button on the Omnibook with the power plugged in powers down the screen, keyboard and mouse but leaves everything else running...perfect!

Toshiba NB100 upgrade from OpenSuSE 11.2 to 11.4

Ok, I have a bit of spare time in between DMSTech and LibDevConX^2 so I decided to upgrade my NB100 to OpenSuSE 11.4 using the downloaded iso image on my Zalman ZM-VE200. Having copied the important data onto the Zalman, I select the OpenSuSE image and reboot.

The laptop boots from the image perfectly, possibly slight faster than from actual DVD drive and I select the Update option when it is presented. The I go with defaults except that I don't let it delete all my added package repositories like Packman and VideoLAN since it's easier to go in afterwards and simply change 11.2 in the path to 11.4 instead of adding them anew. There is one dependency issue which I resolve by not installing the offending item and then it's time to go and get a coffee while installation proceeds.

And that's pretty much it - the install went through without a hitch and it seems pretty much all my settings etc. have transferred correctly.

Omnibook 300 revisited

After a little while gathering dust, I managed to score a 1.1 BIOS card for the Omnibook 300 off eBay. This means that the beast can finally use Compact Flash cards, and provides great resting place for some of the pile of CF cards under 1G that I have accumulated. The machine actually pre-dated the PCMCIA ATA specification so, on release, it could only use linear flash cards or one specific WD drive with a somewhat home-grown ATA-over-PCMCIA spec.

If you insert a blank (FAT, not FAT 32) formatted CF and boot up, the ROM DOS will ask you if you want to format it. This puts Doublespace on the drive which just takes up processing power and RAM. This made sense when all you could get was a 10MB flash card or a little 40MB WD hard drive but not with 256MB of CF goodness. So, politely decline and all the necessary boot-up files will be copied to the uncompressed drive.

I have been experimenting with alternative shells to Win 3.1 Program Manager since it's a bit painful. Back in the day I was fond of the IBM Workplace Shell for Windows which gave Win 3.1 an OS2 like look-and-feel with things like right-click context menus. However, it doesn't perform very well on the Omnibook and the OS/2 grey dialogues don't render very nicely on the unlit mono display. The next thing to try was Calmira II which attempts to replicate the Win95 shell and performs rather better.

I also rediscovered and joined the Omnibook mailing list - targetted at the classic OB's it hasn't got a lot of traffic now but  if you post it lights up with activity as OB fans come out of the woodwork. The archives are a mine of information.