We proudly present our newest kid: the new bytemine appliance 6a16!

The facts: 6 Gigabit ethernet ports, 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1 GB SO-DIMM RAM (can be upgraded to 2 GB) and of course it runs off a CompactFlash! Furthermore it features two USB 2.0 ports, a CompactFlash, a MiniPCI connector and two SATA ports.

Best news to that is: It is passively cooled and as all our products very low in power consumption (about 15 Watts idling, about 20 Watts on load).

The model is available as a barebone as well as with our bytemine openbsd appliance software. The 6a16 will become the new SOHO variant of our OpenBSD appliance line-up.

For included parts, more information and (of course) ordering visit our shop.

The direct links are:

With our software: bytemine openbsd appliance 6a16.

As a barebone: bytemine appliance 6a16.

Because we apparently did not communicate this straight up: We offer two years warranty on Alix and Soekris products. Nothing new, you might think, this is already defined in EU directive 1999/44/EG. But what makes this special is that we also offer this warranty to companies, not only to private customers.

We also clarified this in our shop descriptions.

As a reliable source for embedded boards coming from Soekris Engineering we’ve been asked many times on wether it is possible to order PC Engines systems from us. Well, we’ve finally made them available through our online shop. We also carry the 19” cases as well as various add-on products.

As a special deal, we currently offer the 2d13 at a special rate.

As we just did a short remote-hands job in one of our server rooms, with me being in a remote location having to tell a Daniel (the newest addition to the bytemine team) when to disconnect and reconnect an external drive, I once again noticed how nice it is to have LC display on the bytemine openbsd appliances there. A quick demonstration:

hanah # lcdalert 10 "hey daniel" "" 
hanah # lcdalert 30 "please" "disconnect drive" 
hanah # lcdalert 30 "DONE" "THANKS" 

Nice, heh. A short extract from the manpage of lcdalert(8) to explain what it does:

Synopsis:

lcdalert duration line1 line2 [port]

Description:

The lcdalert utility submits two strings with alert priority 
to the server LCDd.  The line1 and line2 are the strings 
to be displayed by LCDd. Both strings are required.  
To omit one of the strings, quote an empty string.

I think, it is useful :)

Enjoy!

We thought, we give you a little visual impression on how cool the display of the bytemine openbsd appliance actually is. There is also a video available, that shows the display and the interaction with the menue as well as the bootloader.

The display is feed through the programm lcdssd(8) which has a set of configurable screens. Through the configuration file all screen can be turned on and off. By default the display shows the hostname and BOA-version screen, uptime and load average screen, physical interfaces as well as the clock screen.

For the physical interfaces the interface name, link-state and IP are displayed:

Additionally with the 1.2 version of the bytemine openbsd appliance we introduced screens for OpenVPN status information. These show the name give to the vpn service, number of connected users as well as the amount of traffic that has crossed the VPN.

I really recommend watching the video, to see all the other screen that are currently available with the 1.2 version of the appliance software. There is also an internal version of the video, but in order to get to see that, you need to contact us and we might share it ;)

In the course of releasing version 1.1 of our bytemine openbsd appliance, we’d like to tell you about some details.

The bytemine openbsd appliance ships with a nice written manual which covers lots of configuration topics. Following OpenBSD’s good practices to write documentation for every file, we wrote man pages for every program and file we added on top of the OpenBSD default installation.

Let’s move on to the first boot of our new appliance.

The bytemine openbsd appliance comes with a pre-installed operating system, however there are certain details, we cannot decide for our users and customers during the installation. That’s where ba-firstboot(8) enters the stage.

The ba-firstboot(8) program will run during the very first boot and will ask you questions like the machine hostname, network interface configuration, nameserver configuration, smarthost for the MTA, timezone and some more stuff. After answering the questions and another reboot, your machine should be ready to be used.

Don’t panic. You can configure the bytemine openbsd appliance just like a regular OpenBSD system if you want. We just added some convenience to get the system up and running.

Learn about the bytemine openbsd appliance system.

A good starting point for learning about our additions to a regular OpenBSD system is the bytemine-appliance(8) manpage. It will explain the first boot configuration, the system startup options and will provide links to other man pages.

So far for the first steps. Following articles will highlight some more details and components.

Have fun!

It’s been couple months since we announced the bytemine appliance and back when we announced the hardware, we said, it is the building block for a new product line. Here comes the next step!

The bytemine openbsd appliance!

It is built on OpenBSD 4.5 and includes a whole lot of additions, such as:

• ba-update(8) – a software-updater to update your installation with security- and bugfix updates provided by bytemine
• an extended bootloader to support the LCD
• software to make use of the LCD from within the operating system
  • lcdssd(8) to display status information
  • lcdexec(8) to interact with the keypad and execute commands from the keypad
  • mlcd(8), lcdinfo(8) and lcdalert(8) to display various data on the display
• rescue.rd – a rescue system which can be booted via the keypad
• printed manual and documentation of all extensions in man-pages

Through the above mentioned “ba-update” command you can easily update the appliance to always have the latest updates we release.

And for the german folks, here is a poster we did for the bytemine openbsd appliance release bbq last thursday:

Yesterday we’ve released our additions to LCDproc on github . The branch can be seen here. Holger, the newest addition to the bytemine team, wrote a driver for LCDproc to talk to the display in our bytemine appliance . Of course we will see about getting our additions to LCDproc to be incorporated into the mainline.

You might want to watch our github repo for more software in the future.

Last weekend we’ve spent in Chemnitz at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2009. We took the chance and presented the bytemine appliance for the first time to a broader audience. A few of our customers already had the chance to call one of these babies their own.

I have to say that the the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage are a very well organized community conference. Not only they offer every help possible for exhibitors, but they also managed to put up a very interesting conference programm, that is targeted at the typical audience of such an event.

We arrived Friday night and as such had to put up our booth as well as the OpenBSD booth (which was located in the community area, and bravely guarded by Bernd) on Saturday morning. Our booth was right next to the Zarafa, which made it possible to even further establich our relationship with them (but more on that in a seperate blog post, I promise!)

As you can see from the picture, we even displayed our bytewear! We actually sell these hooded sweaters and t-shirts too :)

Saturday was finished up with a nice social event accompanied by a wonderful buffet! Here is a picture of 3/4 of the miners present in Chemnitz.

We’ve had many interesting talks with visitors as well as other exhibitors and I’m inclined to say:

See ya in Chemnitz 2010!

By the way, you should check out the list of “upcoming events” on our blog, we go many places and love to exchange ideas!

Recently the errata description for Issue 0006 seems to have been updated. It now lists in much more detail, where the problems come from. Still, it seems rather weird, that all older models, and first generation 5501’s don’t suffer from the problem. We have now contacted our distributor for SiliconSystems CompactFlash cards in order to have a statement by SiliconSystems regarding their CF-standard compliance. Stay tuned.