Marvell Sheevaplug

The Marvell Sheevaplug low-power "plug computing" device. http://www.marvell.com/products/embedded_processors/developer/kirkwood/sheevaplug.jsp

sheevaplug: Wed Feb 17 01:23:00 2010

Wed Feb 17 01:23:00 2010

In the last year I've gone to running three Sheevaplugs - one for dev, one as an AFS and Zephyr server, and one as my secondary DNS. That leaves one "big" server (Dell Poweredge 830, 4 SATA drives in 2 software-RAID pairs) which is now responsible for most of the noise in the room, but is also the most important, as it holds (among other things) 130G/over a decade/nearly 70 thousand of my pictures.

Conveniently, Marvell/Globalscale just announced the GuruPlug: a SheevaPlug with

• more RAM
• builtin 802.11
• builtin bluetooth
• 2x USB2
• 2x GigE
• eSATA

This looks like it will make a fine replacement, given a SATA port multiplier (perhaps something simpler than the SATAport 5-way) and external drive bays - plenty of circulation, no noise, and around 2TB of disk. The main question will be whether I phase it in (OpenAFS volume movement works just fine) or do it as a full in-place upgrade (as I did with the other SheevaPlug AFS server, which replaced [over the course of half a dozen reboots] an old SparcStation...)

• GuruPlug http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.aspx
• SATAport http://www.sataport.com/

sheevaplug: Sun Oct 18 15:32:00 2009

Sun Oct 18 15:32:00 2009

The Sheevaplug ships with ubuntu 9.04 and a kernel in flash. I wanted something more modern, and it turns out that Debian guru Martin Michlmayr has already done all of the work...

1. upgrade the "u-boot" firmware on your device to 3.4.19. All this takes is setting up a tftp server (I used tftpd-hpa) and copying u-boot*nand.bin from the upstream zip file into /var/lib/tftpboot - no DHCP hacking, just make sure you have an IP address to use for the brick itself...

   • instructions http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/uboot-upgrade.html
   • upstream http://plugcomputer.org/index.php/us/resources/downloads?func=fileinfo&id=54
   • get a USB hard drive; partition it however you want, but for the purposes of these notes, flag /dev/sda1 bootable, and mount it on /mnt
   • debootstrap lenny /mnt

   • chroot /mnt

   • from inside the chroot, install more stuff as desired, but in particular, flash-kernel and linux-image-kirkwood

   • set up /etc/hosts /etc/passwd and any Kerberos or ssh host keys you need
   • if you want afs, just install module-assistant, then later you can m-a update and m-a a-i openafs
   • make a copy of /usr/sbin/flash-kernel and hard code machine= to the value it expects for the sheevaplug, then run it
   • while you're in there, set up /etc/kernel-img.conf per the flash-kernel README
   • unmount, connect to the USB console (it's a lot easier to hit the timing for interrupting the normal boot sequence if you're already there) and then reboot
   • now follow the "Boot the system" instructions from http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/unpack.html -- you probably want to save the output of printenv, first, so you can staple things back to the ubuntu install if things go wrong.

At this stage you've got a brick that boots Debian entirely off an external hard drive, and with the flash-kernel hook installed, allows you to treat it as an entirely normal Debian system, nothing special at upgrade time. I've got one set up as a kernel and package builder (the DNS server one is still running the stock ubuntu with security upgrades.)