zen.org Communal Weblog

Every Memorial Day when it’s not too rainy a parade marches past my front door. This year, my parents, brother, close friend Chris Quanstrom and his fiancée stopped by. After the parade I served some Belgium waffles. I got a Belgium waffle press as a wedding gift, so whenever waffles are made in this house they are always of the Belgian variety.

To go with the waffles, I got some bacon from Ely Pork Products. I cooked them according to Alton Brown’s Scrap Iron Chef’s Bacon recipe. Well, to be precise, I only used the last paragraph of the recipe, the entire recipe makes bacon from scratch. The last paragraph says:

Place the strips of bacon onto a sheet pan fitted with a rack and place into a cold oven. Turn the oven to 400°F and cook for about 12 to 15 minutes, depending on how crispy you like your bacon. Remove from rack and drain on paper towels. Enjoy.

It worked out great! everybody loved them, I just didn’t get enough. So thank you Mr. Brown. Later this day I got a copy of your book I’m Just Here for the Food to give as a gift to somebody (I don’t think anybody reads my blog, so I’m not to worried about that person guessing it’s for him). I already have my own copy.

On Tuesday I got lm-sensors working on my singular set of systems. I got Debian Sarge to boot one of them via PXE. The documentation to the motherboard said that lm-sensors works on Red Hat, so I was pretty sure Debian would work too.

Using Debian’s debootstrap package I installed an extra partition with on a separate server with Sarge. In order to use the lm-sensors detection I wanted a kernel that has the I²C configured as much like Debian’s shipped kernel as possible but also be NFS root bootable. I took the latest stable 2.6.x kernel from The Linux Kernel Archives, and the latest 2.6.y kernel configuration file from the latest configured Sarge package; x=6 and y=5 at the time I built them. I made sure CONFIG_ROOT_NFS, CONFIG_IP_PNP_DHCP was on, and the network card was staticly linked too. After building the kernel I installed the modules in the Sarge partition.

I configured an NFS server to export said made Sarge partition with no_root_squash on. Set up TFTP with PXE files. Then set up a DHCP server to boot that system via PXE. Remote booting the system went fine and the sensors-detect command mostly reported accurate information.

I build a kernel with our in-house specifications, included the discovered I²C packages. Now it gleefully reports the CPU temperatures. Even though it feels like I used a jack hammer to plant a daisy, it now works.

Since my Kernel build seems to be taking forever, here is what I’ve been up to. I’ve been trying to get lm-sensors working on this Debian mix Woody/Sarge system. I didn’t mix them, I just inherited them. They need a special built 2.6.x kernel, and the systems don’t have a CDROM or floppy.

Working with the mixed system has been a pain in the butt, even though I followed  §3.8 of the APT HOWTO I think I’m having package version issues. So I’m making a pure Sarge system just to boot via of them. It seems a bit overkill, but you gotta do what you gotta do.