So I spent a few hours redoing the File server setup, switching out the mother board drives etc… Only to recall why I never used the dual 1ghz machine in the first place.  When placing an IDE or SATA PCI card into the motherboard everything slows to a crawl.  Its some issue with the motherboard and is stated on the TYAN site.  So I wasted away a few hours of my life for nothing.  I did however reinstall the File server with the old hardware and a copy of Ubuntu Server.  The new install is much more optimized than the later which is the only plus from the experience.  Damn you TYAN and your Dual p3 motherboard issues.

After abruptly being woken up today nice and early I figured that I would put some work into my linux box. It was almost foreign to me, since I haven’t been doing anything linux since I moved. My Mediacenter has mainly just been sitting online running as a Transparent Squid proxy, Caching DNS server, Fileserver to my XBMC. The specs of the machine are as follows:

1.25ghz AMD XP
512 PC2700
784gb of Random SATA Drives.

As you can see its not anything that special, but houses a decent amount of drive space and handles everything just fine for my needs. That being said I wanted to squeeze a as much juice out of it as possible. I figured the best way to do this would be to remove any unused services that start, really no need in running cups when there is no printer connected to it. I also removed bluetooth, pcmcia, and a bunch of laptop services.
I really need to find my extra ram that I have laying around and spruce it up to 1gb of ram, as well as purchase another SATA card so I can add a few more drives that I have laying around. Adding the SATA card should boost me up to around 1tb of storage. More than enough space to start downloading the internets.

I have been having problems with kTorrent not unzipping the ipfilter list that it downloads and finally came across the solution.  I run gnome on my system and since kTorrent relies on a lot of kde libs and such it is only logical that it might have some issues.  For anyone having problems with the ipfilter not converting make sure you have the run the following command on your machine.  In my case I run Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install kdebase-kio-plugins

If it still doesn’t work with this … umm well I dont have a fix for that.

So I took the plunge and upgraded my Ubuntu install from 7.04 -> 7.10. And I must say that that WOW, they did it right with the new release, seems a lot smoother and everything works perfectly. I am however having issues with the upgrade to my Work computer, its probably due to the fact that everyone and there brother is installing the updates today. Guess I might have to hold out for a few before I discover the 7.10 goodness on my work computer.

Here are the steps I took to install a TFTP server onto an Ubutnu 7.10 machine.  The reason for this installation was to serve the BootRom and sip settings for Polycom Soundpoint IP 501 phones on the office network.

The first thing that you need to do is install the TFTP server onto your Ubuntu machine.  We will assume that you already have this Ubuntu machine setup and running on your network.

$ sudo apt-get install tftpd-hpa tftp-hpa

Once you have installed the TFTP server you will need to edit the TFTP configureation file

$ sudo nano -w /etc/default/tftpd-hpa

When you edit this file by default it should look like so

#Defaults for tftpd-hpa
RUN_DAEMON=”yes”
OPTIONS=”-l -s /var/lib/tftpboot”

Now you can leave the settings like this if you want.  I changed the following line from

OPTIONS=”-l -s /var/lib/tftpboot”

To this

OPTIONS=”-l -s /home/pxeboot/”

I mainly did this because I wanted the files hosted on the home partition in case of a system crash since I have the /home partition synced nightly to a backup drive.
After I had changed the config file I created the user pxeboot with the adduser command.  Now when ever I need to add files to the phones I just su pxeboot and go about downloading and changing the files.
Now to obtain the newest BootRom and Sip software package.  Change into the pxeboot directory and run the following.

wget http://www.polycomnz.co.nz/software/BootRom_3_2_3RevB_release_sig.zip
wget http://www.polycomnz.co.nz/software/spip_ssip_2_1_2_release_sig.zip

This will download the latest software for the phones, just unzip them into the /home/pxeboot directory and that is that.  Only thing left to do is set your Polycom phone to access your Ubuntu machine.  You can make that change under the Admin settings menu, since you are using TFTP you do not have to supply any login credentials.  Reboot the phone and it will download the new BootRom and Sip packages.

So I just scored me a free used Dell, has like a p4 @ 2.8ghz and what not’s.  So I will be reinstalling my mythbox again tonight, about damn time I say.  Updates as they come.