Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Cerberus in Greek and Roman mythology, is a multi-headed (usually three-headed) dog, a mane of snakes, and a lion's claws. He guards the entrance of the Greek underworld to prevent the dead from escaping and the living from entering. Cerberus is featured in many works of ancient Greek and Roman literature and in works of both ancient and modern art and architecture, although the depiction of Cerberus differs across various renditions.

Let me say that this project was born as university homework, and became a foolish project, just for fun. I have chosen the name "Cerberus" for 3 reasons:

• because this project figure as the guardian of my digital underworld to prevent the personal information from escaping and the hackers on the other side of the network from entering
• because there are 4 nodes, more specifically 3 PowerPC 405GP DHT nodes, plus 1 big node that acts like master control
• because it's just a funny "hostname"

btw, It does hw cryptography, 405 GP supports it, so my Cerberus has really 4 heads, the first node is a Walnut motherboard in ATX form factor, it has 10/100/1000Mbit/sec lan, a sATA controller and a 4 uart board used to control other 3 nodes, which are DHT-Walnut in custom form factor, 2 of them have sATA controller for softRAID (2 hard drive for each a sATA controller), the last one has micro drive, and will have the 10/100/1000 lan replaced with an USB.

the whole system is completely remote controlled and it is able to bootstrap from the lan, in case of lan-hanupup the microdrive-node is also able to perform tftpboot in order to bootstrap all the nodes. So Cerberus is always able to bootstrap, even if the LAN is off line.

the grey plastic box is the PSU control, it contains rele' connected to nodes and to an MPU that is always powered by the ATX PSU and always connected to the lan, this way It is able to perform selective (node by node) wakeup on lan. The MPU is based on Philips ARM, and it runs uc/OS2 with an ENC SPI-10Mbit/sec lan attached on the top. I will replace it with a router like Fonera 2202.

the black box is a 6 bay sATA, it can take up to 6 sATA hard drives

this is the earlier ancestor of this project, a pretty DHT-Walnut node used to develop UBOOT raw-disc access, used to raw read the first partition of an MBR-harddrive in order to load and boot the linux kernel.

with my friend i have opened a ewiki page about, i hope it's useful in case you want to replicated, and it may be you can find DHT-Walnut boards on ebay (dot com)

still to be completed, it was an university home-work in where i have invested part of my free time in order to get my degree

As for 'Cerberus', re-read James Joyce, Ulysses , Episode 6, Hades.

Wow, deluxe!

Did you make the case yourself?

That is pretty sweet looking. I'm obviously a big PowerPC fan, but why the 405? Purely the HW crypto?

ClassicHasClass wrote: but why the 405? Purely the HW crypto?

i originally bought because these boards were offered on ebay at cheap price, something like 30 USD each the DHT, and 90 USD the ATX, so i bought a stock of 4 DHT( Cerberus used 3 of 4), and 1 ATX. Now i am using the 405GP as it can provide HW crypto, that's is fine a lot if combined with soft mirroring

vishnu wrote: Did you make the case yourself?

it was done by laser cutting, you only need to design the case, export as CorelDraw, and send the project to a "service", that will cut plexiglas for you, shipping you the goods back. It may be cheaper than you can imagine. In my case i have bought an already made case and i have redesigned just a few parts, e.e. the frontal plane used to stock the 3 DHT boards

ivelegacy wrote: it was done by laser cutting, you only need to design the case, export as CorelDraw, and send the project to a "service", that will cut plexiglas for you, shipping you the goods back. It may be cheaper than you can imagine. In my case i have bought an already made case and i have redesigned just a few parts, e.e. the frontal plane used to stock the 3 DHT boards

Really! Well you could knock me over with a feather...

It is a work of art though!

Acrylic peecee cases have been around since the pentium 3 was hot stuff. However, yours is very nice

thank you, guys

now i have to think about the firmware and the configuration of the NAS

id like to get my hands on a board like this , shame ebay doesnt seam to have them

I guess you won't find one on ebay, all of these boards are gone.

I was told they came from business failure, I bought a stock of 20 boards from Mexico in 2009

I sold a lot of them, and I am using 3-4 nodes, how many boards do you need ?
I might provide one (offered to a friend of mine), but I have to check if it's possible (if he still needs it, or not)

I also have a PPC440 and a PPC460 board for sale, full ATX, even if not so well supported by linux
(bought for avionics purpose, because Avionics uses PPC440/460, Windriver and Green Hills do support them)

and I have two Sandpoint/7410(=G4) boards for sale, full ATX

contact me in private

p.s.
these nodes do not have a great firmware support , you can't bootstrap a kernel linux which requires dev-tree
also, bootstrapping from pATA is not supported by Uboot, and my patch is too old, and no time to port it
('cause a lot of things changed since 2007, which is the uboot version I used)

p.s.2.
I am working around "kexec", it allows an old kernel to load and boot a new kernel.

p.s.3
I have opened a topic in the WTS section of this forum, in case you want to purchase one of these PowerPC boards!