noob questions re POGO-B01/OXNAS & Arch

[mrhuge]

About a year ago I bought a pink Pogo-B01 and learned barely enough about ArchLinux to install it and get Samba running so I can see it from my Win7/8 network. I was working on next steps like lighttpd, rtorrent, and making a backup of my boot drive when I thought I had bricked it and set it aside. Now I'm getting back to it and thankfully it's not bricked at all: it boots up, solid green light, visible on the network, etc. I'm trying to get back the [very small] knowledge I had accumulated a year ago and I find I have some very basic confusion so I'd like to get confirmation on a few issues...

After some stumbling around, I think I've worked out which designations apply to me: Pogo-B01, Oxnas, Classic, Armv6.

As a "Pogoplug Classic", I think my device is a close cousin to the V3 and the Pro, and my *guess* is that if I see instructions for a V3 or Pro related to ArchLinux, they probably apply to me, whereas if someone writes "If you have a v2, then ..." I can mostly ignore.

From http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv6/pogoplug-v3oxnasend-life I know that my device is "deprecated" relative to ArchLinux and not fully supported, so I may be in the wilderness at times. I don't fully grasp the consequences of that fact, for example I don't really follow this quote from the above link:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')color=#0000FF]In order to use some packages that used to have initscripts (Samba, transmission, etc) YOU will need to provide a startup script to put into /etc/rc.d/ You can find these in the changelogs to the packages upstream. [/color]

[moonman]

You are right about oxnas.

We've transitioned to systemd instead of initscripts that were used previously. ArchWiki assumes you have systemd and not initscripts. You will have to find initscripts yourself if you want things to work.

Some links:
Latest rootfs: viewtopic.php?f=55&t=5733#p32619
Explanation on how to obtain initscripts: viewtopic.php?f=55&t=6121
Some initscripts collected: viewtopic.php?f=55&t=5002

[mrhuge]

Thanks for the reply, moonman! Especially the link to find initscripts.

That said, I must confess that I had to go to ArchWiki to grasp what initscripts are. Sorry for the extremely remedial questions but...

I knew there was a distinction between older rc.d & newer systemd - does "rc.d script" mean the same thing as (or subset of) "initscript"? And does that mean that when I see instructions for running systemd, I need to find a corresponding rc.d command? Or am I drawing a bad parallel?

And when you say "You will have to find initscripts yourself if you want things to work", you mean if I want to add some new functionality I will need to find initscripts for it instead of the newer systemd commands/scripts/thingies, right? I mean, my system is "working" now, since I just woke it up from a 12-month coma.

And further do I have to be careful updating packages because the update might depend on systemd? I just stumbled onto this in the ArchWiki page for "pacman" that seems like it might be relevant:

For example, to avoid installation of systemd units use this: NoExtract=usr/lib/systemd/system/*


Thanks again, and sorry again for the kindergarten-level questions...

[moonman]

rc.d scripts = initscripts. The problem is that every package used to come with an initscript to start and control daemons. Instead, now all the packages come with systemd service files and all initscripts were remove from packages.

Usually systemd and initscript names are the same/similar.
whenever you see "systemctl start smbd" you will have to "rc.d smbd start" or "/etc/rc.d/smbd start". Also you will likely not be able to do a full update on the system with pacman- Suy. I'd recommened to just reinstall with the rootfs I pointed you to.

[mrhuge]

OK, once again, thank you for your help.

I've just made it through the install process with the oxnas-rootfs-2013-06.tar.gz you pointed me to, and I'm not confident that I haven't made a complete mess of things. Before I type "reboot" and have my pretty pink pogo come back as a brick I thought I'd confirm a few things...

At first I didn't have the "cloudengines" folder where it was supposed to be, but I found a forum post describing where to find and copy it. OK, but then when I ran blparam to get the values for BOOTARGS, NEWARGS etc, I noticed that the values for "ipaddress" and "serverip" were 192.168.1.20 & 192.168.1.122 - but my network uses 192.168.222.x. I can imagine that that might be no problem if the correct IP's are found through DHCP at boot time, *OR* that I have to fix it to avoid getting lost at boot time. I decided it couldn't hurt (famous last words) to fix it, so I ran

/usr/local/cloudengines/bin/blparam serverip=192.168.222.1
/usr/local/cloudengines/bin/blparam ipaddr=192.168.222.160

Does that seem like a reasonable way to address the issue or is there something else I should do or test?


2nd question ... I was trying to install the newer rootfs onto a 2nd flash drive with my original drive still plugged in. That seemed like a reasonable thing to do, but now I'm a little worried that between all the juggling of /sda1 & /sdc1 etc it may prove to have been a dangerous choice. *Should* I be able to boot from one USB drive, then plug in a 2nd drive, format it, install arch, shutdown, unplug the 1st drive and boot from the 2nd? I substituted /dev/sdc1 every time I came across "/dev/sda1" in the oxnas_install.sh script, EXCEPT for the "bootargs" strings where I left it at /dev/sdc1, since I wanted to be writing the system onto /sdc1, but once I would be booting from the new drive it would be /sda1.


Thanks for any assistance you can provide in preventing me from blowing myself up...

[mrhuge]

SWEET MOTHER OF ALL THAT'S HOLY, IT WORKED! (I really wasn't expecting that after I stumbled through the install)

I wasn't connected to the internet at first, but entering nameservers in resolv.conf fixed that. And I get a warning when I reboot saying that it can't determine runlevel - I've looked far enough to guess that has something to do with the systemd issue. And my clock is messed up, but I'm sure I can figure that out.

I might fire more stupid questions tomorrow, but for now I'm going to bed satisfied/relieved

thanks for your help

[WarheadsSE]

There is no battery backed clock, so expect to need to run ntpd/openntpd

Thanks Warhead! Grateful to have another big gun helping my sorry ignorant self.

Starting with trying to get my clock right, I noticed that when I tried to start/enable openntpd manually, I got the following:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')root@alarm ~]# /etc/rc.d/openntpd start
/etc/rc.d/openntpd: line 9: /usr/sbin/pidof: Permission denied
:: Starting OpenNTPD [BUSY]
/etc/rc.d/openntpd: line 17: /usr/sbin/pidof: Permission denied
[DONE]
[root@alarm ~]#

[WarheadsSE]

There is no hwclock.

[mrhuge]

Thank you both again ... I'm in pretty good shape now (amazingly).

I realized (facepalm) that I had done something completely wrong in installing Arch the second time around, resulting in me thrashing around for a day and a half and asking silly questions in this thread - I tried to follow the same instructions I had followed when I installed from the stock pogoplug, which meant running the oxnas_install.sh script, and when that didn't work I tried to duplicate the instructions within it ... so I was doing a bunch of stuff designed to (A) transform the plug from a plug into Arch and (B) install the OS on the machine that would be running it, both of which were wrong/unnecessary (I was installing from a standalone Arch PC). Sigh.

After doing it the right way (ie just formatting the stick and extracting the "last best" tar onto it), everything worked as expected (duh) and I have Samba working and my clock is fine, etc.

I can't get Webmin to run - but I can't find anything about a needed initscript for it (I edited miniserv.conf). That's a pretty small problem though.

Thank you both for your help.