Darwin's Theories - thecus tag

Thecus Back To Life

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:47:00 GMT

The Thecus N2100 whose untimely demise I blogged recently is now, I'm happy to report, back to life, thanks to some help from the folks at Thecus in Taiwan. I'm putting some finishing touches on the OpenBSD install notes that should be ready in a few days.

Flying Thecus has hard landing...

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 01:21:00 GMT

The Thecus N2100 sits idle in a corner, because the vendor changed the software in a way that breaks the ability to install most open-source OSes.

The OpenBSD install, like many others, depends on setting certain firmware commands to be saved in the flash memory, and executed at boot time. This worked nicely on the versions of Thecus that the OpenBSD support was developed for, but in current versions (1.93+, including mine) Thecus modified the firmware to still save these commands, but to ignore them at boot time and use their "standard" ones. They also removed the source code of previous versions from their web site, making it very difficult for even advanced developers to figure out how to revert this unfortunate change. They have also refused to provide information on how to fix it, saying I must contact my reseller (since I bought it used, there is no reseller). I have been told that other open source projects are having similar problems, so it's not just OpenBSD that's affected.

Until Thecus changes this code back, so it actually honors the fconfig boot script settings, I can not advise buying this unit. If you want a small standalone unit, consider Soekris instead.

Flying Thecus Eats Cereal, err, Gets Serial

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 02:35:00 GMT

The Thecus I wrote about previously is partly up and running. The OpenBSD install, unlike that for Debian, requires use of a serial console. The serial port was designed into these devices primarily for debugging, not what a consumer appliance needs. So nowadays the manufacturer saves a few pennies on each unit by not soldering the internal connector in place. But at least the holes are there. The older units have a 10-pin header (with one pin removed) on the back of the disk circuit board. The newer ones only have a set of 9 holes for you to solder in your own header. Since mine came sans header, I just installed one. I used a right-angle header since the ribbon cable I had was straight, so the angled header leaves more room for air flow at the back of the unit. Connect a ribbon cable, plug the other end into a computer's serial port, and boot; you should see some textual chatter. Right? Right in theory. But not necessarily in practice. In fact, it's about 50-50...

The ribbon cable that connects from the header on the disk board to the serial cable or the serial port on the computer is of the same type as used on older i386 PCs, but there are two different types of 10-pin IDC to DB-9M ribbon cable in use, which look identical (the differences are hidden inside the DB-9 connector). Trust the "pee cee" industry to devise two totally different and incompatible cables and not provide a standard marking for them. Details on these cables have been committed to the OpenBSD installation document for the Armish.

So now I can see bootup messages, and interact with "RedBoot", the firmware boot loader these machines use.

RedBoot(tm) bootstrap and debug environment [ROM]
Red Hat certified release, version 1.93 - built 17:25:00, Feb 6 2007

Platform: THECUS N2100 (IOP80219)
Copyright (C) 2000, 2001, 2002, Red Hat, Inc.

RAM: 0x00000000-0x08000000, 0x0004b890-0x07fd1000 available, total: 128 MB
FLASH: 0xf0000000 - 0xf1000000, 128 blocks of 0x00020000 bytes each.
== Executing boot script in 3.000 seconds - enter ^C to abort
^C
RedBoot>

The next step was to install a hard drive as per the vendor documentation and OpenBSD as per those notes. These both went smoothly. The last step will be to make it automatically boot up when powered on...

Monty Python's Flying Thecus

Sun, 13 May 2007 01:39:00 GMT

OK, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago now for JavaOne, and I bought a Thecus. If you don't know what these are, find out before you read on. I wrote this blog entry at the time, but am just now catching up; I'm backdating the post appropriately.

So. I bought the Thecus on eBay for US$200, which is about half of the MSRP. With the cooperation of my eBay seller, I had the unit shipped to my hotel during the week of JavaOne. It arrived on Thursday - I had unchangable airline tickets for Friday afternoon, so this was a bit closer than I might have wanted. But OK. I opened the huge cardboard box and found lots of bubble wrap and this dinky little Thecus cardboard box with an even littler Thecus inside it. No drives, but it powered up, responded to pings, and even made some response to the web browser.

Friday comes. Put my mostly-empty JavaOne backpack into the cardboard box so I don't have to carry that home, tape it up, and head to the airport. The cab driver lies to me about what terminal to get off at, so I'm honking this great hulking cardboard structure from terminal to terminal. There's a shuttle train but you still have to wind up walking through a parking lot, which is pretty weird.

Get to the Air Canada counter to check in. Since I went on the web and printed up my boarding pass earlier in the day, I go to the "web bag drop" counter. Just as I get there, the employee serving the person in front of me wanders off. I wait for 10 minutes and nobody even pretends to ignore me, so I go back to the main line. Finally get a live person. Neither she nor the supervisor can tell me what the limitation on liability is in case they lose the sucker, and they don't offer insurance anyway. The super gives me a number to call that they've contracted out their insurance; when I call on my cell, it turns out to be RBC Insurance, and they don't do anything out of the ordinary, and they won't insure you after you've left on your trip anyway. Then the counter people eventually figure out that the liability limit is about $9 per pound, and the box weighs about 9 pounds (including the backpack and a bunch of printed matter). C$81 is not enough coverage on a US$200 machine.

So I get disgusted, rip open the cardboard box, put the Thecus with some of the bubble wrap into the backpack, and abandon the cardboard box (I folded up the little cardboard box and put it in there too).

Now it turns out my return routing is a little convoluted, to say the least. When you book late, you often get the butt end of routings. Think San Francisco-Vancouver-Montreal-Toronto when all I wanted was San Francisco-Toronto. So I check to see if there is any room on the direct flight, but am told it's full. I check my suitcase and wander off with the two backpacks, imagining that the U.S. security people are going to have a total hairy bumble about this little computer that has no monitor or keyboard so they can't see what it is.

I needn't have feared. I take it out of the backpack and put it in the gray tray, but SFO security doesn't blink (though they do examine the X-ray scan). I guess they get a lot of computer gear heading out from Silicon Valley via that airport.

So I get to clear Canada Customs at Vancouver. I write on the form that I have $250 worth of stuff, when I'm allowed $200, but the agent is in a good mood and we wind up talking about conventions instead of Thecuses. Then I find I've lost my pre-printed boarding pass, so I stand in line for half an hour to get another.

Then I see another direct flight to Toronto, and ask if I can get on it. Well, no, you see, "because you have checked luggage". Sigh. I wouldn't have checked it if they'd told me there was a direct flight to Toronto leaving just before my stupid jaunt to Montreal. If I go to Montreal I want to have time to explore the town, not rot in the airport for an hour or two.

Anyway, eventually we leave Vancouver. The plane is an Air Canada A320 with the new all-electronic entertainment system. Perhaps the electronics are jealous of the Thecus' ability to serve up iTunes content, because it just keeps saying "Not available" after making people navigate through 4 or 5 choices. Two of the stations near me just hang completely. Finally enough people complain that the purser reboots the whole system. When it finally starts working (about ten minutes after the first complaints), I flip to the movie "Bridge to Terabithia" - which my kids have seen but I haven't - and hear the character "Leslie" say that TV "rots your brain". Well, that's what you need on a long flight.

Eventually get to Montreal, after midnight. I don't even have to go through security here, because arrival and departure are in the same area. My ears are going crazy from all the upping and downing, but I'm almost home with my Flying Thecus.

Almost in a daze from this long day's journey into night, I find my car and drive home. Then I have to sleep for a few hours, and see if I have the right bits to make up a serial cable for the Thecus so I can convert it from Linux to OpenBSD. This machine will store "all" my files, so it needs to be "stable and secure". But that's a tale for a later blog...

P.S. This post has nothing to do with Monty Python. Name used under "fair use" as a title parody only.

P.P.S. Monty Python is a trademark of, well, Monty Python.