{"id":246,"date":"2008-03-19T19:18:34","date_gmt":"2008-03-20T00:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.opticality.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/19\/who-needs-floppies\/"},"modified":"2008-03-19T19:18:34","modified_gmt":"2008-03-20T00:18:34","slug":"who-needs-floppies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/19\/who-needs-floppies\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Needs Floppies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since I just wrote about my laptop spring cleaning, I may as well get one more geek post out of my system. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

I run many Asterisk<\/a> servers. I love it. That said, I am still running the 1.2.x branch on all of the servers. They are up to 1.4.18.1 on the production branch. I will never install the 1.4 branch. Not because I don’t believe it’s good, but because they are getting close to releasing 1.6 into production (they are currently at 1.6.0-beta6!).<\/p>\n

So, I was interested in getting a test machine set up to install it (after it goes production), so that I can get to know it before committing it to production servers. I considered running it on a VM on my laptop, but I really want to avoid that if I can (read my spring cleaning post again for any number of reasons).<\/p>\n

I considered buying a used machine on EBay, Geeks.com, Tiger Direct, etc. You can get pretty beefy machines for under $200, and reasonable ones for well under $100 on EBay, but you’re risking the seller, etc.<\/p>\n

Last week, while at Zope Corp., I noticed that they were gathering old junk<\/em> in an area for their own version of a spring cleaning. In that pile were two old machines. One of them was a Dell Dimension 4550, a 2.53Ghz machine, 30GB hard drive, with 256MB of ram. Not exactly the kind of ram you’d like to see, but otherwise more than adequate to power Asterisk. For a test machine, ideal!<\/p>\n

I asked (multiple times) if anyone else hoped to snag it, or ever see it again. People laughed (rightfully so). \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

Into the back of my SUV it went. I stored it for a week in our utility room and today I finally pulled it out. I wanted to install CentOS<\/a> on it. The other day I downloaded the 3.6GB DVD ISO in a drop over an hour on my FiOS link. Yummy!<\/p>\n

I popped the DVD in the drive and booted. Nothing, it just booted into the existing CentOS 4.2 (I wanted to install the 5.1 release). Hmmm. Thankfully I didn’t waste time figuring this one out. I quickly found out that the machine had a CD drive, no DVD. OK, moving on…<\/p>\n

I downloaded and burned a CentOS net install CD (only 7.1MB) and booted again. Again, straight into the old CentOS. Hmmm. Somehow, the CD drive isn’t working (boot order was set correctly).<\/p>\n

I didn’t have root access on the machine, and it can PXE boot (boot over a network, but I didn’t have a target machine for it to boot off), but it can’t<\/em> boot off a USB device. \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

Floppies to the rescue! My second choice for an operating system was Debian<\/a>. I downloaded five floppy images for a net install. I booted off of the floppy, and it failed again. This was getting very tiresome…<\/p>\n

I booted into the existing system, and tried to mount and read the floppy. It took forever, but finally, I got a clean listing, so there was no hardware problem with the floppy. I tried that with a CD, but it was never able to mount that, so indeed, there is a hardware problem with the CD drive.<\/p>\n

It turns out that even though I pressed F12 to change the boot order, and I picked the floppy, it failed. I pressed F2 (for yucks) to get into setup. Once I moved the floppy boot up the ladder, and saved, it successfully booted off of the floppy. Whew.<\/p>\n

I now have a smooth running Debian system configured to my taste. I am now patiently awaiting the final release of Asterisk 1.6.0.<\/p>\n

So, do we need floppies? Hopefully not going forward. But, as long as there is life in older systems (and clearly there still is), the fact that my four-year-old laptop has a built-in floppy drive ended up saving me some headaches. More important, are you impressed that I had five blank floppies handy as well? \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since I just wrote about my laptop spring cleaning, I may as well get one more geek post out of my system. \ud83d\ude09 I run many Asterisk servers. I love it. That said, I am still running the 1.2.x branch on all of the servers. They are up to 1.4.18.1 on the production branch. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3,2,14],"tags":[237,238,1364],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4","category-3","category-2","category-voip","tag-linux","tag-server","tag-voip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opticality.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}