Re: [ccp4bb]: Firewire - Linux - upgrade of a Mandrake 7.2 box

[Ethan Merritt <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

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On Friday 19 July 2002 04:05, you wrote:
>
> A question pertaining, NOT to CCP4 per se, but to computing:
> we currently have our Linux box operating Mandrake Linux 7.2.
> At the time, Firewire (IEEE 1394?) was not supported.
> The latest Mandrake distribution indicates automagic recognition...
> But we do not wish to install ML8 on this machine.
> Is there any way to upgrade our box so that we could use
> a PCI-Firewire card (so as to be able to use a firewire disk
> after synchrotron trips)?

The issue is not which version of Mandrake you are running.
The issue is what version of the kernel, and in particular the
loadable modules ohci1394 and sbp2.
So what you need to do is install a newer kernel. You can
perhaps take an officially-blessed Mandrake kernel from 8.2,
or you can (as I have done) simply build your own kernel from
the kernel sources on http://kernel.org. Make sure you 
build and install the loadable modules also.
I recommend kernel 2.4.18 + Alan Cox's patch set

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.18.tar.gz	  
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/alan/linux-2.4/2.4.18/patch-2.4.18-ac3.gz 

You can, of course, have multiple kernels installed on your machine
and choose which one you want at the time you reboot.  So there is 
little danger in playing with new kernel versions, since you can always 
return to your old one if there are problems.

After booting 2.4.18 you can force the loading of firewire support by 
typing
    modprobe ohci1394
    modprobe sbp2
Then you can check that the disks are recognized (they are listed as 
SCSI disks - don't let that confuse you too much).
    cat /proc/scsi/scsi

After that the details depend a bit on your system configuration.
I am using Mandrake with devfs enabled ("devfs =mount" as a boot option)
and for me the 1st firewire disk magically appears as /dev/sdb1

	hope that helps,

		Ethan


-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center Box 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195
phone: (206)543-1421
FAX:   (206)685-7002