EAZIX

EAZIX: First day

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I thought the first day would just be a "eman, meet everyone; everyone, meet
eman" kind of day. I expected it to be an "... and here you have the
cafeteria, and there's the water dispenser" day, but it wasn't.
It was great! I was given an introduction of what they are doing, and what
i'm supposed to do.
They were making this camera that's connected to an i86-based computer,
which can be controlled, and would transmit data thru a network (a utp
cable, to be precise). I'm responsible for the network stress testing,
making sure that the data transfer would be reliable and efficient. If
there's any problem, i'm supposed to find out what it is, and solve it.
Also, i'm assigned to install two working RPM-based GNU/Linux systems on
it, Redhat and Montavista. These were all to be done on a computer with:

• a Geode 400Mhz Processor
• a 15-pin VGA Compatible


• 2 USB v1.1 Ports
• 1 IDE Interface
• 1 Compact Flash
  Interface
• 1 RS232 Port (no hand shaking)
• 2 PCI Card Slots
  (3.3 & 5V)
• 1 RTL8100C 10/100Mbps Ethernet Device
• ATX
  Power Input

So i took the parts i needed and assembled the pc.
After installing Redhat 7.3 (they used an old version to ensure stability),
i made sure the network card is working well, and that network connectivity
is OK. All of these were all fairly simple, i just had to brush up on my
knowledge of System V based distributions (ie, Redhat & Montavista). I've
done the job in less than three hours, and couldn't continue with the other
stuffs that i needed to do, so i just volunteered to help out on what the
other trainees were doing.
There are four trainees that came from UP Manila who my immediate superior,
Ina, introduced to me. One of them, Patrick, was a classmate of mine in
high school. There are two of them working on speeding up the video output
by making the transfer directly from CPU to video card - because of my lack
of advanced training in C (microwindows, to be precise), i can't help them.
The other two, however, are testing the other hardware (hard disk & usb), i
helped them in a few commands and configurations, but mostly, i did
nothing. I couldn't continue my job cause i didn't have enough resources...
that afternoon, they took the monitor i was using, so i had to manually
install modules, and shutdown the computer, and aside from the lack of a
monitor to work on, i was only given one computer, which makes it
impossible to test peer-to-peer network performance.

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Regarding the installation, here's the partitioning scheme they
suggested: table>
Since the hard disk i'm given is larger than the one specified, and it is
inappropriate to have such a large swap space for the installation (see
Linux manuals for details), i took the liberty of doing some adjustments,
here's what i did:

Disk Partition	Sizeth>	Description
hda1	49MB	/boot - for boot images
hda2	7.7GB	/mvl - Montavista fs
hda3	6.7GB	/rh - Redhat fs
hda5	3.5GB	/data - for test data files
hda6	499MB	/swap

Disk Partition	Size	Description
hda1	49MB	/boot - for boot images
hda2	7.4GB	/mvl - Montavista fs
hda3	7.4GB	/ rh - Redhat fs
hda5	3.3GB	/data - for test data files
hda6	164MB	/swap

This setup would work with what they plan to do and it could be easily
reconfigured in case they didn't like it.