GTABUG Installfest 2003-02-01

The GTABUG held an installfest on Saturday, February 1st, 2003 at the offices of SQL Power.

What's an installfest? Well, here's what we did:

• We had about 14 people, 2 extra-large pizzas, and a lot of soft drinks
• Before people arrived, we installed NetBSD on a new celeron machine, which got used as the IPNAT firewall for the rest of the day.
• OpenBSD netbooted on a HP PA-RISC model 712/60 workstation
• NetBSD netbooted on a Sega Dreamcast (now that I have the NIC for it)
• FreeBSD installed on an old, naked P133 motherboard (no case!)
• FreeBSD installed on a super-deluxe dual Athlon-2Ghz in a blue/cutaway case
• Louis showed up with a freshly-installed OpenBSD on his Sun IPX
• Louis also brought a big rackmount HP/Intel system with OpenBSD on it
• We built a serial cable for an HP9000/800 (which worked first try!), but couldn't figure out how to get past the second-stage boot program. I don't think there's any BSD support for HP9000 anyway.

This picture isn't really from the installfest, but it's kind of on-topic for BSD enthusiasts.. so I thought I'd share it here:

MSDN Subscriptions? We subscribe to MSDN Universal at work. I've alternately referred to it as "Pandora's Box" and the "Frisbee of the Month Club" (comes in assorted fruity colours!). Our first set came with a big sticker. I couldn't think of a more appropriate device to stick it on...

And here are some pictures from the event (Thanks go to Louis Bertrand for several corrections to the original captions):

	This is me (Jonathan) ringing out the console port for the HP9000 IO/Boot Monitor board. I ended up finding the pinout on the web, and went by that.
	This is Andrew installing FreeBSD on a disemboweled Pentium 133 machine. Note the extra CPU fan keeping the table's temperature well under control. The terminal in the foreground is a real live DEC VT320 terminal. Unfortunately, we didn't get to use it during the installfest because the keyboard was malfunctioning.
	A general room shot. This is the boardroom at SQL*Power, where Dan and I work. The tables aren't normally covered in computer junk! :)
	From left to right: Louis's Sun IPX (OpenBSD/Sparc) sitting on top of a huge rackmount HP server (OpenBSD/intel); Louis's IBM Thinkpad (Mandrake Linux); and SQLPower's HP712/60 workstation (HPUX in this shot, but we later got it netbooting OpenBSD/PA-RISC). In the background, you can see the super-cool blue case for that dual athlon system (and David David, who built/owns it) that I mentioned in the installfest summary.
	Me playing with the cable for the HP9000 console port again.
	Andrew photographing OpenBSD on the HP712. That's Julian in the chair behind him, who actually got it up and running.
	Another shot of Julian surveying the fruits of his labours with OpenBSD on the 712.
	Dan using his iBook (running Mac OSX) to monitor the HP9000 console (yeah! the cable worked!)
	My Sega Dreamcast running a netbooted NetBSD/Dreamcast. The machine itself is hiding behind the LCD screen.
	Peering into the big HP rackmount server.