We’re in need of a good and stable database server at the club station PI4RCG to facilitate central logging. In two weeks we’ve a balloonfoxhunting thing coming up and there must be 3 operators able to log their QSO’s (80m, 2m and 70cm). Last weekend I ran into a Sun Cobalt RaQ550 server. A nifty little 19-inch server with a Pentium III, 1.26GHz, 2x80GB harddisks in RAID1, 512MB memory onboard. No video/sound so you need to switch on a serial line to be able to see the terminal. You can connect to the terminal with for instance puTTY with speed 115200 and 8N1. The original OS was not reachable because the owner forgot the passwords. Not a big problem because I want to run Debian Linux on it anyway. Since Google is your friend I went surfing around to find how to install Debian Lenny on a Sun Cobalt Raq550. There are some articles but most of it is out dated.
If you’re interested, please read on how I made it work.

First you need to know the Cobalt hasn’t a BIOS on board. It has some sort of ROM were a linux kernel is located. That kernel is in fact a bootloader like Grub or LiLo but extremely simple. When you want to run linux on a Cobalt RaQ550, you need to flash this ROM so the bootloader is able to boot your linux kernel from disk. I run into this article on how to do that. I’ve made a virtual machine in VMware, running Debian Lenny, a DHCP-server, a NFSserver and a NFSshare with a installation of Debian Sarge on it. And also 2 files from this site (the ROMflasher and the new ROMfile, the 2M-version is especially for the RaQ 550).
When booting from network on the Cobalt I was able to flash the ROM.
From step 3 I was in the dark because my Cobalt wouldn’t recognize it’s own disks while booted from the network. It sees its disks when initializing but they are not reachable for fdisk.
I snatched 1 disk out and put it in another server. There I booted from the Debian Lenny netboot installer and installed Lenny on the disk (be sure you put /boot on the first partition, I just used one partition for / and /boot). Then I booted the disk and change some setting like inittab (for the serial connection) according to the howto.

The Cobalt is nog able to boot from the disk yet. What took me several days and a whole bunch of howto’s to figure out are the next steps:

– ‘aptitude install build-essential bzip2 kernel-package gcc libncurses5 libncurses5-dev bin86 gawk ncurses-dev initramfs-tools linux-source openssh-server’
– ‘cd /usr/src/’
– ‘tar -jxf linux-source’
– ‘ln -s linux-source linux’
– ‘cd linux’
– ‘wget http://files.parvi.us/gentoo-stuff/patches/cobalt-kernel-2.6.x/linux-cobalt-2.6.32-2009120301.jeffw.patch’
– ‘patch -p1 /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.x.x-Sun-Cobalt.bz2’
– ‘du /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.x.x-Sun-Cobalt-RaQ550.bz2’ and check if < 1800Kb!!
– 'cd /boot'
– 'rm System.map vmlinux.bz2 initrd.img'
– 'ln -s System.map-2.6.2x.x-Sun-Cobalt System.map'
– 'ln -s initrd.img-2.6.x.x-Sun-Cobalt initrd.img'
– 'ln -s vmlinuz-2.6.x.x-Sun-Cobalt-RaQ550.bz2 vmlinux.bz2'
– 'shutdown -h now'

Now shutdown the install host and put the disk back in the Cobalt. It must be able to boot into Lenny and your Cobalt is up and running. Congratulations!
I put a lot of time in trying to enable RAID1 on the Cobalt, but it seems impossible. The fact that the bootrom keeps on calling /dev/hda1 makes it not possible to rise things to /dev/md0. (at least not possible to add hda1 to the RAID because resource is busy, can't work around it).