The UCC has Ubuntu-on-Tap!

Possibly conceived as the brainchild of mad-man hacker Davyd Madeley (but possibly not) the has UCC installed a network port for the express purpose of installing Ubuntu.

The Ubuntu Port was installed by the combined efforts of David Basden, Matt Johnston, Davyd Madeley, James French (who broke the network, twice), one power drill, a multimeter named Albert and the Klone Krone.

The port is allocated to its own VLAN on one of our Cisco Catalyst switches, and fed into the trunk of the router madako. Madako offers network bootable images to anyone who boots via DHCP on this port, as well as allowing access to UWA's Ubuntu and Debian mirrors.

As of (unknown), the Ubuntu On Tap port has been removed from its own VLAN, and it is now possible to netboot Ubuntu and other operating systems from any clubroom LAN port.

Using the Port

To install Ubuntu on your machine, follow these easy-peasy steps:

Plug in via Ethernet (try not to steal Ethernet cables from a machine); Reboot your machine; Tell your machine to network boot (many laptops allow you to select the boot source by pressing F12); Follow the prompts (just hit Enter at the image selection screen); and, while you wait, Listen to the Ubuntu theme song (as heard on LugRadio).

The port also allows you to install Debian from UWA's mirror, and test your machine's RAM using Memtest86+.

To install Debian on your machine, follow these easy-peasy steps:

Plug in via Ethernet anywhere in the clubroom(try not to steal Ethernet cables from a machine); Reboot your machine; Tell your machine to network boot (many laptops allow you to select the boot source by pressing F12); Follow the prompts, hitting F3 at the image selection screen DO NOT HIT ENTER AT THE 'boot' prompt, this will select Ubuntu, and you don't want this, instead type the name of the version you want, such as sarge26...then hit enter Listen to some better music than the Ubuntu song while you wait

Future Goals

Teach it to recognise Apple machines, and netboot those appropriately;

Offer a list of Ubuntu architectures where it is undetectable, as well as Live images, and perhaps other Free operating systems;

Get a nicer sticker and a neon sign (Ubuntu on Tap);

Install an Ubuntu Power-Point that not only recharges your laptop, but delivers Ubuntu over IEEE P1901;

...

Profit!

Davyd has (boring) photos on line.

Boring Technical Details

Coming Soon!

Memtest86+ took far too long to get working. There is a documented 'feature' in PXELINUX that treats image files ending in '.bin' (among other things) as a special case. However, it also treats symlinks to files named '.bin' as a special case, even when the symlink does not contain the characters '.bin' anywhere in the name.

The theme song is played from a script on madako that is fed tftpd log entries. When it sees the Ubuntu kernel loading, it connects to maroon, and enqueues the theme song.

References