Bootstrapping -- a serial installment
I've been putting together the various systems I've had lying around over the past couple of years into a functional network. Various goals, partly just keeping myself out of trouble.
\r\n\r\nOne box is a classic -- Thinkpad Type 9545. That's a 486 laptop with a docking station. ~10" display, mouse buttons and nubbin, onboard floppy, CDROM and speakers on the accompanying docking station, along with full ports (keyboard, mouse, printer, serial, and some random stuff). Two 16 bit PCMCIA slots. Thought is that it might make a decent gateway/firewall system (lord knows it does little else ;-).
\r\n\r\nProblem is that the NICs I've got (Belkin F5D5020, more later) don't want to work. Feh. I've got one that does, but it's shared with another laptop.
\r\n\r\nThe CDROM doesn't work (apparently a SCSI driver, messed with that a bit). And the floppy's dodgy.
\r\n\r\nSo, options through now have been to sit down in front of this puppy and mess with it, or get real work done. Oh, and for some reason, video out doesn't on the KVM (though keyboard in does, handily blocking the onboard keyboard).
\r\n\r\nHrm....
\r\n\r\nWell, I've got a bit of serial null-modem cable handy. And while SLIP didn't seem to work.... Yes, I can run a getty on /dev/ttyS0. Muck about with minicom. Hrm... minicom -s /dev/ttyS0 Bump up the buad, as 9600 is painfully slow. OK, and sync both sides. A few init qs, nothing like risking ruin.... No, vt220 doesn't work, so fix it blind back to vt100. Ah, there's a color switch. Coolio.
\r\n\r\nBut terminal access doesn't do much for file transfer. Though minicom's got z/y/xmodem protocols built in, I don't have the client-side software on the remote side. But there is an "ascii" transfer mode....
\r\n\r\nBrainwave: use a "shar" archive to send files in text mode, usually by opening a vi session and typing: :0r!cat<return>, then initiating the transfer. An awk script consisting of {if (NR%2) {print}} strips the added linefeeds (even lines are tossed). But shar uses uudecode. Rats. But there is a [link|http://www.perl.com/language/ppt/src/uudecode/uudecode.nick|perl implementation of uudecode]. Rawk! Transfer this via ASCII mode. Then uuencode the sharutils deb and transfer it. And while we're at it, lrzsz which has the x/y/zmodem protocols.
\r\n\r\nOK, we're bootstrapped to the point that we can get packages installed. Granted, at 56k locally, but still. The zmodem stuff still doesn't work (a pointer to a "here's how you do x/y/z modem file transfers with minicom" would be appreciated. Last time I used any of this stuff was about fifteen years ago. Literally. But I've got something I can work with, with some pain, now.
\r\n\r\nSome useful zmodem links from [link|http://www.uv-ac.de/ipaqhelp/index-2.html|iPaq] and [link|http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/upload-zmodem.html|Remote Serial Console HOWTO].
\r\n\r\nOh, and a trick I learned: 'here' documents with a quoted terminator don't do shell expansion on contents, so:
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\ncat <<'EOF' > foo\r\n<stuff>\r\nEOF\r\n\r\n
...should allow you to put arbitrary 'stuff' in there. Though in my case it doesn't quite work as advertised.
