Polaris

The "Build a Computer" class has begun to shift gears with the new semester. We finished building the computer last semester and are now trying to actually use it. In the first class meeting in January, we tried to use installers I had made on the mac in my office -- they didn't work. In the intervening week, I built new installers using a linux box and found that there was a step that the Mac directions don't include, where you install something in the bookblocks of the device. That was consistent with the failure mode we were seeing, where the device was visible in the BIOS but did not appear bootable. Unfortunately, there was a holiday and then the next class period was on the first day of the new semester and I felt like I needed to skip North Star to be in my office for people with first-day problems. But I sent the installers with Daniel so that he and the others could try them out. They called me a couple of times with questions, but succeeded in finishing the installation and named their new server "polaris".

This week, we built accounts for everyone on polaris. We updated the groups file and then tested to make sure that everyone could log in and could become root. Then we tried to set up networking.

My general plan has been that eventually the server could become the router and firewall, plugged directly into the cable modem. We're continuing with that possibility in mind. For the meantime, however, the server will reside behind the wireless basestation and so we wanted to set up wireless networking. It took some reading of man pages and a bit of googling, but eventually we got everything in /etc/network/interfaces, stopped and started networking, and we were able to ping out. We ran apt-get update and then were able to install tinymux.

My plan is to have them set up tinymux as their first service: something fun. And then move to other services. I'm looking forward to next week.