first attempt at a LEAF using the Bering distro

[Charles Steinkuehler]

> Posted last night about my first attempt at Bering.
>
> Anyone here have experience with PPPoE, dsl and Bering?

PPPoE: Yes
xDSL: Yes
Bering: No

> Mr.Steinkuehler are you here???

More "here" than usual, that's the problem!  Actually, instead of my
office in Topeka, I was in KC with my wife for a doctor's appointment
this morning (nothing serious), accounting for the increased latency in
my SMTP response time. :-)

> I need to get this up and running, and the job completed.  The $$$ are
> on the table.

Understood...I'll do what I can to help, but my expertise lies more with
Dachstein than Bering.  While Bering is in many ways derived from
Dachstein, the update to a 2.4 series kernel, the migration to
ShoreWall, and IIRC the new kernel-mode PPPoE drivers kind of obsoletes
my existing knowledge of configuration tweaks.

Your best resource for information will likely be the LEAF-user mailing
list (and archives):
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user

The majority of the traffic these days is related to Bering, and there
are several knowledgeable folks who can help.

I can try to provide some general pointers regarding your previous
questions, but please remember I have yet to actually attempt to run
Bering in a production environment, and have done very little with it
even in a test environment...

> Finally got sbcdsl synched up and running on one of the Win PC's for
> this moonlighting gig I landed.
>
> The first go around with Bering was less than stellar however.  I
didn't
> get anywhere I don't believe.
>
> I guess my biggest problem is the lack of the usual tool set.
>
> What do you use to view the files? (after the initial configs, when
> troubleshooting) I know there is an editor available, but I can't
> remember what it is.

Historically, LRP and LEAF distributions used "ae" for the editor, while
newer versions have switched to e3 (written in assembly with
key-bindings for "windows-like", vi, wordstar, and emacs IIRC).  There's
probably a symlink from ae to whatever editor is installed, so I'd try
that first.

> no cat, no ls, no ifconfig.

cat, ls, and similar should be part of the BusyBox "swiss-army-knife"
multi-purpose binary.  If they are not working, you probably have
something seriously wrong with your configuration or download.  NOTE:
If your system crapped out somewhere early in the init scripts, you
might have the busybox command available, but no links to it from the
"normal" locations.  Look for busybox in /bin or /sbin, and run your
familiar commands as "busybox ls -l" rather than simply "ls -l"...a
plain "busybox" should tell you what commands are compiled in.

Some distributions (such as Dachstein) forgo inclusion of ifconfig (and
it's cohort route) in favor of the more powerful, smaller, and less
understood iproute2 (aka "ip") command, but I believe Bering uses
ifconfig by default.  If you can't run ifconfig or ip, this would again
indicate a very basic, very serious problem.

>  ifup just tells me
> eth0 and eth1 are already configured, however at boot up, the system
> tells me eth1 is not installed. The lights on the nic's light up when
> plugged into the dsl modem or the switch.  ping revealed that the
> "network is unreachable" when plugging the nic's into the modem one at
a
> time and a reboot for each.
>
> I'm stumped that the system tells me that eth1 isn't installed at boot
> up, but the lights on both nic's work when connected, and ifup tells
me
> eth1 is already configured.
>
> I'm stumped on how to troubleshoot anything with the lack of an
> available tool set (at least the one's I know and use)

Based on your problems, squinting hard to read between the lines, and
taking a WAG based on my Dachstein experince, I'd say something's wrong
with your basic setup, and the root filesystem is not getting populated
properly.  Bering loads an initial ramdisk and kernel with the syslinux
bootloader...the initial ramdisk includes enough resources to build the
desired root filesystem image on one of the fancy new 2.4 kernel
filesystems (tmpfs, ramfs, or something like that) by uncompressing the
desired *.lrp packages, then switches the root device over to the newly
created filesystem.  The creation of the real root filesystem is
governed by some settings on the kernel command line, passed by the
boot-loader (look at the syslinux.cfg file on the floppy).  I suspect
you have something wrong with one of the settings in this file which is
causing packages to not be found, the wrong packages to be installed, or
similar.

Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net