You see it lacks the thermal control. I’ve been mucking around for a while trying to get the thermal issues under control on the cheap. That is; making use of old power supply fans to keep the air circulating, pulling in cool air, and pushing out warm air. In winter it’s really not a problem. I used to have the door ajar, (and getting dust in at
the same time), and a fan pulling air into the house, which actually warmed up the house a bit. Even in winter, with the door closed and all fans turned off, the cupboard gets to 35C in around 30 minutes. Summer is much worse. With temperatures soaring to 40C, any device will cark it quickly. I’ve had several hard disks die this way.

It’s winter here at the moment, so decided to do something about it. Winter is the easy part. Just suck in cold air from the outside. We’re seeing between 5C to 10C at night so sucking that air in will cool that cupboard down well. I trotted off to Bunnings and bought an inline fan unit that’s designed to pull air from one room and distribute it to
another. It was a bit steep, IMO, at $80, but is just the ticket.

I had to, though, run a large diameter pipe, or tubing from the side of the house which is 6m away. I could have cut into the roof sheeting, but didn’t like compromising the roof, and I wanted to pull in the air from the south side of the house. We fortunately had some left over 100mm PVC drain pipe, so I cut a hole in the side of the house, shoved a 6m length of pipe in, and connected it up with 100mm elbows, to inside the cupboard. I put a filter on the inlet on the side of the house, (hopefully it won’t block up quickly).

The fan is a 150mm fan, so I had to buy a 100mm to 150mm PVC expander. On the end of that I gaffed some springy tubing to the inline fan, and attached some more tubing off the other side. There’s enough there to direct the cold air directly at the air inlets of all the equipment.

I had to dangle the fan from some coat hangers from the ceiling to avoid noise from vibration. I quickly discovered that a 40W fan can generate some loud vibrations. Note the use of coat hangers which are the second best hacking tools, (which I’m sure MacGyver used more than once).

The results were pretty amazing. Below are some RRD graphs of one of my servers, with 4 1Terabyte disks in it. Already you can see a 10C drop:

Next thing to sort out is the summer cooling.

The handy thing with this inline fan is that it has a trap door to stop back drafts. What I might do is, (sort of), the reverse in summer. That is: suck air from the inside of the house, through the cupboard, and into the roof cavity. The cooler air being forced into that space will disperse the hotter air already there, and will consequently make the house cooler. So, I’ll probably need another one of these inline fan units, or else make a valve attachment.

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OK, it doesn’t actually boot from SD, but uses a snazzy Linux trick called pivot_root. Which switches over one root with another. This, IMHO, is probably the best way of doing it apart from actually directly booting from SD. Although, I’ve only tried this on a 38xx based iPAQ it should work for all handhelds based on familiar. Heck, it should work for anything really.

Preface

The general idea is to boot up Linux from the internal flash of the iPAQ to just before it runs the environment. Check the SD slot for a loopfs file, if one is there, then mount it up, switch roots, and continue to boot.

Why?

There’s several benefits to doing it this way:

1. Backups — Since you have a copy of the root filesystem on SD, you can back it up very easily. Every PC these days has a SD slot. Just whack it in and copy the file across, you don’t even need Linux to do it either.
2. Choices — You can startup either environment GPE or OPIE, just by changing SD cards. (Further updates to setMMCroot will allow selecting environment by buttons.
3. Saving files — regardless of what environment you run, you can still save the files directly to the SD card. If you need them elsewhere, turn off the iPAQ, pop the SD card out and chuck it into a PC and read them. Easy!
4. Dead SD — If your SD card dies, you can still run with a basic environment that is already loaded up on your iPAQ. With other methods, if your SD dies that’s it. Things start going wierdo.

Pre-requisites

You’re going to need several things to do this:

1. Linux based PC, any dist will do.
2. An iPAQ — with familiar Linux already loaded up on to it, (doesn’t matter what environment).
3. A copy of familiar Linux , with either the GPE or OPIE will do. I used version 0.8.4 for this HOWTO. You will need the tarballs from here and not the jffs files, (IE either of the *.rootfs.tar.bz2 files).
4. Any SD, MMC, or CF card formatted with FAT16, (if you just bought it you don’t need to do anything as all flash cards are formatted these days).

Step 1 — Create root filesystem.

First we’ll need to create the filesystem that gets mounted up I’m creating a 1G filesystem, because I tend to load up a lot of applications onto my iPAQs. Since I also have a 2G SD card, I will be able to store both the GPE and OPIE environments on it.

dd if=/dev/zero of=loopfs-gpe bs=1024 count=991680

Note the size is just under 1G? This is because a 1G filesystem on an SD card will consume slightly more than 1G. So, I’ve allowed for that. I can fit two filesystems on that card this way. Adjust the “count” to whatever size you want or care for.

Now, you’ll need to setup the filesystem.

mkfs.ext2 loopfs-gpe

This will create a Linux ext2 filesystem. You can really use any filesystem, but you don’t want to use a journelling filesystem like ext3, reiserfs, xfs, as flash memory can’t stand too many writes to it. Journelling filesystem tend to write a lot of data even when not being used, (from a flash point of view).

Mount up the filesystem on your Linux box, (requires root).

mkdir loopfs-gpe.mount
mount -o rw,loop loopfs-gpe loopfs-gpe.mount

Extract the environment tarball into the loopback mount point.

cd loopfs-gpe.mount
tar jxf ../gpe-image-v0.8.4-h3600.rootfs.tar.bz2

You will need to edit /etc/passwd and change the root password to something sensible if you want to login, the following entry will set the password to ‘root’.

root:dquXGWQyEH.uI:0:0:root:/home/root:/bin/sh

Unmount the loopfs filesystem.

umount loopfs-gpe.mount

You now have a brand spanking new filesystem that will be used on your iPAQ.

Step 2 — Prepare your SD.

There are a number of files that need to be created and copied over to your SD card. These are all required.

• Your root filesystem that you just created, ensure it is called either loopfs-opie or loopfs-gpe.
• The setMMCroot script , which does all the work.
• Create a file called loopfs.boot on the SD card with the full path of the loopfs file you created. For example: /media/card/loopfs-gpe, or /media/card/loopfs-opie, or /media/card/i.like/it.here

Remove the SD card and plonk it into your iPAQ.

Step 3 — Prepare your iPAQ.

Fire up your favourite serial port communication program, (I use minicom), to connect to your iPAQ, which should be connected to your PC by now. If you can’t do this, or don’t want to, then you can run these commands from within a console on your iPAQ, (under the Applications tab). The preferred option is to run the ppp daemon from your Linux box and ‘ssh 20.0.0.1′ into your iPAQ, using the following command, (needs root on your PC):

/usr/sbin/pppd /dev/ttyS0 230400 20.0.0.5:20.0.0.1 nodetach local noauth nocrtscts lock user ppp connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -t3 ogin--ogin: ppp"

Run the following commands in a shell on your iPAQ.

ln -s /etc/init.d/setMMCroot /etc/rc5.d/S01setMMCroot
ln -s /etc/init.d/setMMCroot etc/rc2.d/S01setMMCroot
cp /media/card/setMMCroot /etc/init.d/setMMCroot

I had suggested using the ppp daemon because then the next part becomes easy. You ned to install the extra packages on your iPAQ. e2fsprogs, e2fsprogs-e2fsck, kernel-module-loop-2.4, and kernel-module-ext2-2.4. Run this on your iPAQ, or use the package manager to do it.

ipkg install e2fsprogs e2fsprogs-e2fsck kernel-module-loop-2.4 kernel-module-ext2-2.4

Holy toledo batman! You’re almost there!

Step 4 — Reboot your iPAQ.

Reboot your iPAQ, via Start -> Settings -> Shutdown.

When you reboot you should see the following appear just underneath the Linux penguin logo.

#### 1. Checking MMC: #
Found MMC!
Using loopfs: /media/card/loopfs-gpe
#### 2. FSCK filesystem:
/media/card/loopfs-gpe has gone 48850 days without being checked, check forced.
/media/card/loopfs-gpe: 2817/124160 files (0.1% non-contiguous), 12110/247900 blocks
#### 3. Setting up loopback FS:
Using /lib/modules/2.4.19-rmk6-pxa1-hh42/kernel/drivers/block/loop.o
#### 4. Mounting:
#### 5. Ballet:
#### 6. Tidying up:
killall: Xfbdev: no process killed
#### 7. Handover:

The script will wait for 16 seconds for an SD card to be inserted, (a hash will appear every second), else it will just boot up straight from the internal flash. This allows you to just run with whatever is there already, if need be.

Depending on what environment you have running will change some of the messages between each stage. I’ll see if I can take a photo of the bootup stage and chuck it on here. (EDIT: I’ve put up some bloody horrible images of the iPAQ booting, taken with my mobile.)

Boot loader screen.

FSCKing the filesystem.

Ballet school

From there onwards, it’s just the normal boot procedure.

Step 5 — Final install.

Because this is a ‘fresh’ install you will be asked all the questions you would have been asked when you did the initial install of familiar on your iPAQ. If you get to this stage you’ve done it! Congratulations!

Once you have gone through the final install procedure, if you open up a console session and type ‘df’ , you’ll see what the setMMCroot script does. /mnt/realroot points to your iPAQ flash filesystem, and / is the SD filesystem. Cool eh?!

root@h3600:~# df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 976056 387164 539308 42% /
tmpfs 31676 40 31636 0% /mnt/realroot/var
tmpfs 31676 0 31676 0% /mnt/realroot/media/ram
/dev/mmc/part1 1983360 991712 991648 50% /mnt/realroot/media/card
/dev/loop/0 976056 387164 539308 42% /

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Work In Progress, (sorry it’s a bit sparse and hurried, but it’ll give you the general idea).

I haven’t used this method for a while, but just started playing with my iPAQ again, somewhere between then and now it stopped working. Apparently Telstra have made some changes to their APNs. So I’ve updated this page to reflect the changes.

1. Create/modify a couple of files.

Note: Telstra have changed their APN, (Access Point Number), since I last tried this.

File: /etc/ppp/peers/gprs

nodetach
defaultroute
nocrtscts
lock
noauth
# lcp-echo-interval 5
# lcp-echo-failure 3
usepeerdns
230400
local
asyncmap 0
connect /etc/ppp/peers/gprs.chat.connect
disconnect /etc/ppp/peers/gprs.chat.disconnect

File: /etc/ppp/peers/gprs.connect

#!/bin/sh
exec chat TIMEOUT 5 \
ECHO ON \
ABORT 'nBUSYr' \
ABORT 'nERRORr' \
ABORT 'nNO ANSWERr' \
ABORT 'nNO CARRIERr' \
ABORT 'nNO DIALTONEr' \
ABORT 'nRINGINGrnrnRINGINGr' \
'' \
rAT TIMEOUT 12 OK \
ATH OK \
'ATDT+cgdcont=2,"IP,"telstra.internet"\n' '' \
AT OK \
'ATDT*99#' TIMEOUT 22 CONNECT \
"" SAY " - Connected."

File: /etc/ppp/peers/gprs.disconnect

#!/bin/sh

exec /usr/sbin/chat -V -s -S \
ABORT "BUSY" \
ABORT "ERROR" \
ABORT "NO DIALTONE" \
"" "K" "" "K" "" "K" "" "+++ATH" "" "+++ATH" "" "+++ATH"

File: /etc/bluetooth/givepin

#!/bin/sh
echo 'PIN:2222'

File: /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf

options {
        autoinit yes;
        security auto;
        pairing multi;
        pin_helper /etc/bluetooth/givepin
}

device {
        name "iPAQ";
        class 0x120112;
        lm accept;
        iscan enable;pscan enable;
        lp rswitch,hold,sniff,park;
        encrypt enable;
}

2. Pair the phones together.

Get the Nokia to scan for bluetooth devices, and use the PIN that you used in the givepin file to pair the iPAQ found to your Nokia.

3. Create the GPRS connection.

From your iPAQ you can access your phone and connect to GPRS using the following:

dund --nodetach --encrypt --connect 42:42:42:42:42:42 --channel 3 call gprs

Replace 42:42:42:42:42:42 with your mobile phone’s address. To find this you can use hcitool to scan for it.

root@nowhere % hcitool scan
Scanning ...
        00:42:A0:42:26:42  Nokia N70
        00:16:42:DC:42:B8 AUSYDN000649
        42:42:42:42:42:42  I'm right behind you
        00:15:42:DB:42:24  n/a

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Well, you need to find the file includes/domit/php_http_client_generic.php under your Joomla installation, fire up your favourite editor, (VI — of course ). Now find the following section, (line 542 under Joomla 1.0.13).

function connect() {
if ($this->timeout == 0) {
$this->connection = @fsockopen($this->host, $this->port, $errorNumber, $errorString);
}
else {
$this->connection = @fsockopen($this->host, $this->port, $errorNumber, $errorString, $this->timeout);
}

You will need to change this to something like the following. Change your hostname and port appropriately.

function connect() {
if ($this->timeout == 0) {
$this->connection = @fsockopen("proxy.myhost.com", 3128, $errorNumber, $errorString);
}
else {
$this->connection = @fsockopen("proxy.myhost.com", 3128, $errorNumber, $errorString, $this->timeout);
}

Then that’s it! You’re set! It can be slow at times, so ensure that you are caching XML files in your proxy server.

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