"Old Tech" Step By Step

Before my OTP (Old ThinkPad) can become a rolling form of this, it needed a few things.

An operating system that can serve as a decent server, and run stably on old hardware. As it turned out, the most obvious solution, Windows Home Server v1 didn't like my A31. The load threw all manner of errors during the install and generally "acted a fool". From there, I moved on to Ubuntu, which ran very well, but I just didn't like it very much. After a suggestion by one of my internet friends from the ThinkPad Forum, I decided to give CentOS a try. Once I got the ISO burned properly, the load went very smoothly. Everything was recognized and the old P4, with the 2Gb RAM (max) was responding like something a couple of generations newer!

A little bit of this, and Samba was downloaded..... not configured mind you, but downloaded! The configuring part could wait. What I needed to was make sure that the machine would talk to my drives.

The first order of business was to get this sorted out. What is it? Well; it's a hard drive adapter for the UltraBay 2000K (UB2K) generation of ThinkPads. I'm not completely certain, but it's a pretty safe bet that IBM invented the concept of the replaceable device "bay" going all the way to the original ThinkPad. Back in those days, there were many devices that weren't built-in on notebook computers, so there needed to be all manner of standardized (PCMCIA) and quasi-standardized connections to allow devices to attach. The A31 is unique in that it didn't have just one like the run-of-the-mill corporate notebooks, but TWO!!! However, they didn't behave the same. One of my issues was to figure out whether CentOS would recognize devices in these bays other than the normal optical drives and floppies. As it turned out, after some experimenting, it was learned that a second hard drive could be placed in the right-side bay, but not the left. It didn't matter how I set the "boot sequence", the machine would hang trying to boot from the UB2K drive if it was in the left side! When this was confirmed and I could access the secondary drive through the Drive Utility, I was set. Optical drive in the left and hard disk drive in the right. This gives me replaceable storage of relatively large sizes, although it was limited to PATA/IDE drives which is a problem. More on this later.

Next came the dock. In this case, I went with the ThinkPad Dock II, Model 2877 because: a) it's newer than the original 2631 and b) I have it. This "dock" was actually designed for the later T4x machines, but IBM, being IBM made it backwards compatible. So, what's so special about it? OK, first of all; it's an actual DOCKING STATION (hence dock) meaning that it has capabilities of its own beyond what is built into the machine attached to it. Most people call what is in reality a port replicator, a dock. They are wrong. You'll notice that it's quite a bit deeper than the typical port replicator. That's because it has it's own power supply (so no need for the adapter), two more PCMCIA card slots, a half-length PCI card slot, and another UltraBay. On top of that, there are the normal pass-throughs for things like video, serial and parallel interface and floppy disk drive. For all intents and purposes, these things make a notebook computer a full desktop in miniature. It turns out that the A31 running CentOS has so far completely recognized this thing so I can attach all manner of devices to it..... SCORE!

 

The last 2 devices that I needed to get going were the Adaptec AUA-1422 PCMCIA adapter that would give the A31 USB 2.0, and most importantly IEEE 1394 (AKA Firewire).... that's because, I have an old Lacie "Firewire" external drive with a 500Gb hard drive in it. I've had both of these devices forever, and finding a way to use them productively would the the icing on the cake! In fact, I have a second Lacie enclosure that would daisy-chain nicely if it worked. To make a long story short, it worked, all of it. I was able to connect, have the disk recognize, partition and format for Linux in short order. 

So, the concept is almost complete. I can take this old notebook that most people would consider obsolete, set it up almost anywhere as a full blown file server, or pretty much any other service that Linux has in it's bag of tricks. With the various add-ons that it recognizes, I can access an almost limitless amount of storage! 

Now, on to the next (more difficult) stage of the project. Learning how to configure and administer a Linux file server.