Manually unpacking a tar ball of Debian on Cobalt machines

If you have a MIPS based Cobalt machine that does not have enough memory to install Debian, you can manually unpack a tar ball which I have prepared for these systems. You simply need to put the hard drive from your Cobalt machine into an USB enclosure, connect it to your PC and follow the instructions below.

Preparing the hard drive

Take the hard drive out of the Cobalt machine and connect it to your PC with a USB enclosure. First, you have to partition the disk. You need a /boot partition as hda1 as type ext2 revision 0 and a / (root) partition as hda2 as type ext3. The installation will by default try to mount swap from hda5 and /home from hda6 but that can always be changed by editing /etc/fstab (before you put the hard drive in your Cobalt). The layout I had was the following (which is the default "desktop" scheme debian-installer will use on Cobalt):

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1         207       97776   83  Linux
/dev/hda2             208        2842     1245037+  83  Linux
/dev/hda3            2843        8912     2868075    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            2843        3216      176683+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda6            3217        8912     2691328+  83  Linux

Use fdisk to partition your disk (let's call the disk sda for now. Mark sda1 as a bootable partition (press key the a in fdisk) and make sure that at least sda1 is labled as a Linux partition (type 83). Now format the drive:

% mkfs.ext2 -r 0 /dev/sda1
% mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2
% mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda6
% mkswap /dev/sda5

Mount the disk somewhere:

% mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
% mkdir /mnt/boot
% mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

Downloading and installing the Debian base system

Download the compressed base system (about 91 MB). This contains a basic system with a standard set of package of Debian 4.0 (etch, version 4.0r3).

% wget http://people.debian.org/~tbm/cobalt/base.tar.bz2
% wget http://people.debian.org/~tbm/cobalt/base.tar.bz2.asc

Verify that the GPG signature matches:

% gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key 68FD549F
% gpg --verify base.tar.bz2.asc base.tar.bz2

In this base system, I have made the following modifications:

changed the CoLo config file so it won't output anything to the serial console
changed /etc/inittab so it won't use ttyS0

Now untar this system onto the drive:

% cd /mnt
% tar -xjvf ~/base.tar.bz2
% cd
% umount /mnt/boot
% umount /mnt

Boot the system

Put the hard drive back into the Cobalt, make sure it set as a master drive, and boot your Cobalt. It will automatically load CoLo from disk which will then boot a kernel and start Debian. The system will try to obtain an IP address via DHCP on eth0. SSH is installed and remote root logins are allowed. The password is root. There are no users yet. The RSA SSH key of the host is:

29:31:56:94:53:42:9d:e4:81:6a:90:b8:8b:b0:a8:be

What to do now

You have have a working system. There are a few things you should do, though:

change the root password
add normal user accounts

regenerate the SSH key (since the private key is included in the base system on my web page) by running:

rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host*
ssh-keygen -t dsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key -N ""
ssh-keygen -t rsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key -N ""

edit /etc/apt/sources.list and use a Debian mirror close to you and then type: apt-get update
upgrade your system using apt-get dist-upgrade
install ntpdate to make sure the clock is always up-to-date
change the timezone with tzconfig

Go back to my Debian on Cobalt page.