An A31 Project

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#1 Post by **schen** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 12:58 am

I know this sounds kind of crazy in light of the R60 project that I'm hip deep in, but George's excellent post on the A31p got me thinking.

So here's the story. My wife was teaching in a school district with relatively poor technology support, so she asked me if I could find her a few computers that could get on the internet so her class (3rd grade) could use them for some educational websites. I had some A31s sitting around, and also put out some request. Pretty quickly, the little fleet grew to include T43s, T60s and a couple of Z61s, as well as a G4 PowerBook! This summer she moved to a different school district which has a lot of technology AND is a "Mac-Shop". I was charged with selling her fleet so she can switch to iPads since iOS had the best collection of APPs she wanted to use.

This actually ended up going quite well and I've gotten rid of all those machines that I feel OK with putting people on to. Which left the T42p and 2 A31s (I think one is a "p" and one isn't), that I couldn't sell in good conscience. I figured that the T42p would go into my little "museum" seeing as how it was originally mine, went to my father-in-law, to my wife's classroom and now back home. Plus, I have more "thin and lights" than you can shake a stick at, but the A31s are a different story. They are just so uniquely configurable; I just want to do something with at least one of them!

Here are my initial thoughts:
* Turn it into a mobile file server
* Use the original Windows Home Server (which I have).
* Use one of the Linux/Unix distros that are designed to be a server OS.

Here's what I have (or think I have) in the deep dark recesses of the garage:
* A 2631 full dock
* UltraBay hard drive adapter PATA
* 2Gb of RAM (from the T42p)
* CF to PATA adapter, plus any number of CF cards to use as an SSD
* Misc PATA hard drives including a 80Gb/7200rpm Hitachi
* PCMCIA USB 2.0/Firewire card

I figure that the Achilles Heel of the A31 is things like modern web browsing. What if I don't ask it to do that? What do you guys think? Is it a viable option? Which OS would you use? How would you configure the machine?

ajkula66 · #2 Post by **ajkula66** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 8:53 am

You should look into an older -yet supported - version of Red Hat or one of its "free" cousins. I'm fairly certain it would work exceptionally well for your intended purposes.

My mind is pretty much set up on Cent OS when it comes to my own A31p. Might even set up a triple boot: CentOS/XP/OS2...from two different drives...we'll see.

pianowizard · #3 Post by **pianowizard** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 9:02 am

I heard that the A31 has very good speakers, so if I were you I would keep it offline and use it to play music. My Dell Inspiron 7500 (700MHz Pentium III) is mainly for this purpose, though it's occasionally used for low-res videos and Office as well. It has two PATA hard drives, one 320GB and the other 250GB, just enough to store the MP3 files I ripped from my personal collection of >6,000 CDs.

#4 Post by **schen** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 9:26 am

pianowizard wrote:I heard that the A31 has very good speakers, so if I were you I would keep it offline and use it to play music. My Dell Inspiron 7500 (700MHz Pentium III) is mainly for this purpose, though it's occasionally used for low-res videos and Office as well. It has two PATA hard drives, one 320GB and the other 250GB, just enough to store the MP3 files I ripped from my personal collection of >6,000 CDs.

That's an excellent idea, although I've never really thought a lot about the speakers much at all. Wow the mention of the 7500 brings back some old memories of my first job in IT when I had to order one for our graphics guy as his mobile workstation. It was a "hell of a machine", especially in the 15" version with the overhanging screen!

#5 Post by **schen** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 9:32 am

ajkula66 wrote:You should look into an older -yet supported - version of Red Hat or one of its "free" cousins. I'm fairly certain it would work exceptionally well for your intended purposes.

My mind is pretty much set up on Cent OS when it comes to my own A31p. Might even set up a triple boot: CentOS/XP/OS2...from two different drives...we'll see.

I've played with Red Hat a little bit so I'm not completely unfamiliar with it. You're probably the guy with the most experience with the A31; what do you recommend as giving me the best chance of recognizing all the devices in a 2631 dock? If I can get the thing on a dock, the world in my oyster!

Another question on something I haven't played with: I've still got an UltraBay HDD adapter from the "old days", but it's PATA. Those things are getting really high due to rarity, but I seem to remember seeing SATA versions that aren't OEM. Have you had any experience with those? That would allow me to have WAY bigger storage drives (internally) for a lot less money!

I'm almost of a mind to throw FreeNAS on it and give it a whirl and see what happens.

ajkula66 · #6 Post by **ajkula66** » Sat Sep 06, 2014 12:07 pm

No idea about the dock, since I haven't used it since the days of W2K. Have one *somewhere* in the basement...

As for the third-party-UltraBay SATA adapters, some of them work well and some of them not at all. A matter of luck, I'd say. Definitely worth giving it a shot, as long as you get one from an US seller where you can return the darn thing if it doesn't work and not have to pay twice the value of it in shipping...

I'll likely be installing CentOS 6 on my A31p over the weekend, so stay tuned for further updates...

#7 Post by **schen** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 8:59 am

ajkula66 wrote:No idea about the dock, since I haven't used it since the days of W2K. Have one *somewhere* in the basement...

As for the third-party-UltraBay SATA adapters, some of them work well and some of them not at all. A matter of luck, I'd say. Definitely worth giving it a shot, as long as you get one from an US seller where you can return the darn thing if it doesn't work and not have to pay twice the value of it in shipping...

I'll likely be installing CentOS 6 on my A31p over the weekend, so stay tuned for further updates...

I'll be very interested to "hear" about the your CentOS experience, since I'm really thinking that this will be the best use out of these old machines. After digging into my box of old drives, I was able to come up with a few nuggets that I didn't remember having so this thing is really starting to come together.

There were 2 Western Digital 160Gb, and 1 WD 250Gb drives in there, so I should have the basis of some decent storage. If I keep the OS on a USB flash drive, that should give me 2/3 internal bays to hold regular drives, plus another if I'm able to get whatever I'm using to recognize the 2631 dock. The PCMCIA USB2.0/Firewire card will also allow me access to another legacy device sitting around; a Lacie Firewire External with a 500Gb drive in it. All in all, that should get me into the neighborhood of a Tb.

This should all add up to a decent amount of storage capacity that can easily move locations for me. I'll just need to set up some sort of Ad Hoc network to give access to it.

#8 Post by **schen** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 10:57 am

After retrieving two of my them from school where it was semi-retired in the Computer Club room, it was found that they are both "plain Jane" A31s. One is a 2652-CU3, and the other 2652-J3U. Actually, it might in fact turn out to be better than if they were "P" spec'd machine in that they should be a little more generic, giving me a better chance of having the various features on the chipset fully supported, plus a lower res screen, making it easier on these old eyes! They also have processors with lower clocks (1 @ 1.6ghz, 1 @ 1.8ghz) as well, which theoretically should make for a cooler running machine. On top of that, the non-"P" machines should also have a cooler GPU section as well.

Since I have a number of PATA drives, I'll probably load up a number of OS and see what they do with the machine and the 2631 dock. I'll probably start with the original MS Windows Home Server. I know it's old, but I have it, know it, and it has the ability to aggregate random drives with the "Drive Extender" function. And I'm going to have a BUNCH of random drives with this thing!

Oddly, my next question is to decide whether to sell my bigger PATA drive (a Western Digital 250Gb), which is worth a good chunk of change these days, in order to fund a much bigger SATA drive to put in 3rd party UltraBay-SATA adapter in hopes that it'll work!

ajkula66 · #9 Post by **ajkula66** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 11:37 am

schen wrote:They also have processors with lower clocks (1 @ 1.6ghz, 1 @ 1.8ghz) as well, which theoretically should make for a cooler running machine. On top of that, the non-"P" machines should also have a cooler GPU section as well.

They also have the "slow" fan as opposed to the "fast" one seen on 1.9 and up...and that fan will work *a lot* in any *nix environment.

Since I have a number of PATA drives, I'll probably load up a number of OS and see what they do with the machine and the 2631 dock. I'll probably start with the original MS Windows Home Server. I know it's old, but I have it, know it, and it has the ability to aggregate random drives with the "Drive Extender" function. And I'm going to have a BUNCH of random drives with this thing!

I definitely like the WHS idea.

Oddly, my next question is to decide whether to sell my bigger PATA drive (a Western Digital 250Gb), which is worth a good chunk of change these days, in order to fund a much bigger SATA drive to put in 3rd party UltraBay-SATA adapter in hopes that it'll work!

No doubt in my mind that you'll eventually stumble upon a SATA UB adapter that will work. So I'd say yes...

Not to mention that a SATA adapter would allow you to play with a SSD as a boot drive, which could be an interesting experience.

jronald · #10 Post by **jronald** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 3:42 pm

My offer stands on the XP idea, I mentioned in the PM. Just let me know.
There is also Zorin. I have a P4 2.0cpu machine running vanilla uBuntu just fine now. I got to think the Zorin would run "ok"

Ron

#11 Post by **schen** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 4:01 pm

ajkula66 wrote:Not to mention that a SATA adapter would allow you to play with a SSD as a boot drive, which could be an interesting experience.

Actually, I'm also contemplating using a Compact Flash to PATA adapter for a "roll your own" SSD experience. Anybody given that a shot on an older TP?

#12 Post by **rkawakami** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 4:12 pm

re: SATA 2nd HDD adapter for A31

I bought three similar to these: http://www.ebay.com/itm/290883582693 about 3 years ago. Mine came from the seller "nypc-tech", which could be the same guy as "ny-compu-tech". The labeling is different but otherwise everything else looks the same. The only "problems" that you might consider them having is that the HDD must be installed "bare"; i.e., without a caddy attached and that the SATA connector on the adapter does not freely rotate when installing the HDD. Most of the other HD Ultrabay adapters I've used allowed the HDD to drop completely down onto the bottom surface and then you push the HDD into the adapter's connector. This design has a shorter HDD bay which means you have to engage the SATA connectors while the HDD is being angled into the adapter. I would think that after hundreds of insertions there could be some damage to the connector or internally on the PCB its mounted on. However, after almost 3 years of usage and probably about 70 or so mounting cycles, my unit continues to operate fine.

I use one of them precisely in an A31p to verify the functionality of my SATA HDD purchases off of eBay. The bottom tray is plastic (not metal) and open (to keep weight down and/or allow for cooling, I'd guess). Also, all of the other Ultrabay 2nd HDD adapters I've used have a drive locking mechanism at the front of the bay. This one does not. If you need the HDD locked in place, there's four holes on the bottom that provide access to the drive's mounting holes.

edit: Just saw another adapter from the same seller: http://www.ebay.com/itm/300565538584 This one appears to address the problem of the short bay and angling the HDD in, along with securing the drive. It appears that there's the front latch that rotates up when installing the drive and a locking screw built into the left side of the adapter.

Neil · #13 Post by **Neil** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 5:14 pm

schen wrote:I'm also contemplating using a Compact Flash to PATA adapter for a "roll your own" SSD experience. Anybody given that a shot on an older TP?

I've been running my X40 with a CF as the boot device for a couple of years now. I currently have a frugal Puppy Linux installation on it that runs totally in RAM to reduce writes to the CF card. BTW, there is a Puppy Server spin if that interests you. In the past I've run AntiX and a few other Linux as well as WinXP with write protection to keep it from slowing over time. All things considered, it's been a pleasant experience using the CF card as a boot device.

jronald · #14 Post by **jronald** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 5:44 pm

Make it official Stan
http://www.unixstuff.net/index.php?page=stickers

LOL
Ron

#15 Post by **schen** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 5:55 pm

rkawakami wrote:Just saw another adapter from the same seller: http://www.ebay.com/itm/300565538584 This one appears to address the problem of the short bay and angling the HDD in, along with securing the drive. It appears that there's the front latch that rotates up when installing the drive and a locking screw built into the left side of the adapter.

I saw the first one, but not the second one which looks like exactly what I'm looking for. A couple of these with 1Tb drives in them would make a heck of a portable server.

Neil wrote:I've been running my X40 with a CF as the boot device for a couple of years now. I currently have a frugal Puppy Linux installation on it that runs totally in RAM to reduce writes to the CF card. BTW, there is a Puppy Server spin if that interests you. In the past I've run AntiX and a few other Linux as well as WinXP with write protection to keep it from slowing over time. All things considered, it's been a pleasant experience using the CF card as a boot device.

That's good to know, and would not only give me some benefits of SSD OS load, but free up a drive as well. I've noticed that even 160Gb PATA drives are pretty pricey. Selling off, my two 160s and the one 250 might net me enough to cover new UltraBay SATA adapters and Tb drives!

On another note, the WHS load isn't going as well as hoped. I keep repeatedly getting an error copying files to C:\$WIN_NT$.~LS\I386\ . This isn't boding well for that OS! The last time I loaded WHS up on a very generic PIII machine, it went without a hitch. Might be time to seriously look at Linux and FreeNAS! I'll give it one more try with a different optical drive to see if that the issue.

ajkula66 · #16 Post by **ajkula66** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 6:59 pm

I'm probably going to grab one of these adapters and see what I get using UltraBay SSD as a boot device. Should be interesting.

If that ends up working well, then I'll nuke the dual boot that I'm setting up right now on the HDD, and install OS/2 and W2K as a new dual boot.

Will report back on progress - or lack thereof - with CentOS that is being installed as I'm typing this...

#17 Post by **schen** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 8:04 pm

ajkula66 wrote:Will report back on progress - or lack thereof - with CentOS that is being installed as I'm typing this...

I'm actually watching a YouTube video on CentOS as I'm typing this. It looks pretty straight forward. I'll be watching your progress with interest.

ajkula66 · #18 Post by **ajkula66** » Sun Sep 07, 2014 8:57 pm

schen wrote:
It looks pretty straight forward. I'll be watching your progress with interest.

It does seem pretty cut & dry. How well it's going to fly for your server needs remains to be seen, but I'm optimistic.

Installing 400+ updates at the moment...it's going to be a while before I can offer a meaningful review.

Two initial impressions are that the system runs pretty smooth so far, and that the fan is on at all times although the laptop doesn't seem to be getting all that hot...

#19 Post by **schen** » Tue Sep 23, 2014 8:29 pm

This most certainly isn't a meaningful review by any stretch of the imagination, but I've finally got CentOS 6.5 loaded on the A31 and it appears happy. In the middle of my muddled process, I even loaded up Ubuntu 5.10 just to see how it was going to look! Anyway, after some bone-headed shenanigans with not getting my software to burn an ISO properly, I finally got it right and loaded up on my A31.

So far, it behaves as if I gave it new life!

It's actually sitting on my bench/desk right next to a Z97/i5/16Gb RAM/SSD gaming rig that I just helped a student build which is getting it's updates. Yes, that Haswell machine on Windows 7 is blindingly fast, but the A31 on CentOS is no slouch either. I'm impressed by it's responsiveness so far.

I'll offer more thoughts as the project progresses and I try to turn it into the ultimate OTP (Old ThinkPad) Server. Thanks to George for suggesting CentOS!

#20 Post by **schen** » Wed Sep 24, 2014 9:29 pm

The "OTP" continues to trudge along. Last night, I got Samba loaded, but not yet configured. In the process, I found that the machine was able to recognize one of my WD 160Gb PATA drives in an UltraBay adapter. However, it would only work in the left-side bay. If I put that drive in the right-side bay, the machine would hang on boot. It didn't matter what I did with the boot order!

This evening, I put it on the 2877 Dock and confirmed that it worked fine on that. Then I dug out my old Adaptec PCMCIA, USB 2.0/Firewire adapter and it took it w/o an issue.

That was confirmed by connecting an old Lacie Firewire drive enclosure which was also recognized!

That's one of two of those old enclosures that I have and that'll completely not only get me going on creating this little file server, but get rid of more old stuff that's been sitting around.

So far this thing has taken everything I've thrown at it. Now I just have to learn Linux, Samba and this project will be off the ground!

ajkula66 · #21 Post by **ajkula66** » Wed Sep 24, 2014 10:02 pm

schen wrote:
So far this thing has taken everything I've thrown at it. Now I just have to learn Linux, Samba and this project will be off the ground!

You're making better progress than I am...jealousy is starting to kick in...

Any thoughts on fan control, or are you OK with that aspect in your particular setup?

I've put mine on somewhat of a hold, pending another experiment - hardware-related this time around - which is supposed to happen sometime next week...

ScottyBoy · #22 Post by **ScottyBoy** » Fri Sep 26, 2014 10:05 am

Never ceases to amaze me that you can still do so much with ThinkPads, even older retired models such as this one!

#23 Post by **schen** » Sat Sep 27, 2014 11:23 am

ScottyBoy wrote:Never ceases to amaze me that you can still do so much with ThinkPads, even older retired models such as this one!

And this of course is why we continue to "play" with our relatively ancient machines and ThinkPads in general. IMHO, there of certain models that are special which have a lot to do with their ability to be adapted long after they should have been rendered obsolete! For me, these have included the 600, T23, A31, and T60/61.

Although we have relatively modern machines to work with, there's really nothing quite so satisfying as to take an old machine and be able adapt it to a "real world" use while spending little or no money in the process.

ajkula66 · #24 Post by **ajkula66** » Sat Sep 27, 2014 5:57 pm

schen wrote:
And this of course is why we continue to "play" with our relatively ancient machines and ThinkPads in general. IMHO, there of certain models that are special which have a lot to do with their ability to be adapted long after they should have been rendered obsolete! For me, these have included the 600, T23, A31, and T60/61.

A3* format was quite unique at its launch and remains so today. There was so much one could do with those machines, and as schen is proving with this server project, although way too vintage in specs to be reliable daily drivers, they're not quite useless yet.

I've entered the ThinkPad game too late to fully appreciate the uniqueness of 600 series, but to this day I will state that T2* is the perfect 14" form factor in my book.

Although we have relatively modern machines to work with, there's really nothing quite so satisfying as to take an old machine and be able adapt it to a "real world" use while spending little or no money in the process.

QFT.

It's easy to go haywire when maxing out an old system, though. A custom T61 that is my "daily driver" has eaten up a lot more $$$ than the T410 that I'm typing on right now...and the overall performance of these two is stunningly similar.

#25 Post by **schen** » Tue Oct 14, 2014 6:31 pm

The next step has been make on the "OTP" A31. The SATA/UltraBay adapter came this afternoon and like others who've had experience with it, the device worked as advertised. This is really significant in that it'll allow me access to all manner of drives of large size! I was able to confirm it with a random drive sitting around, by being able to run the CentOS Disk Utility.

I then when the next step, took it out and put it in the 2877 Dock II's UltraBay, partitioned it, and formatted from there in FAT so I can move things on and off of it from Windows machines.

So the OTP Portable Server concept is now pretty much doing everything I need it to do. Without external drives connected via USB or Firewire, I can access 2 storage drives. Now I just need to get Samba configured. So wish me luck!

Hierax_ca · #26 Post by **Hierax_ca** » Mon Mar 16, 2015 2:23 pm

I'm testing an A31p 2.0GHz and 2GB RAM model with Zorin OS 9 Lite (based on LXDE/Lubuntu 14.04 LTS with the Windows 2000 look/feel) and the install went super-smoothly (including the Zorin extra software options and several others I added with the Software Managers) and it's working surprisingly well (even able to easily watch YouTube videos and play some games!).

But does anyone know how to configure those characteristic A31 internet side buttons to work in Linux? Seems wrong to get this old beast up and running on the internet and not actually use them!

brchan · #27 Post by **brchan** » Mon Mar 16, 2015 2:28 pm

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ex ... board_keys Should be helpful. Arch is a different linux distro, but the commands should be universal for all linux distros, provided that you have the necessary software installed.

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