Hi again,

well it seems like its really dead... 
The one red LED keeps shining, while the other red LED is off. No reaction when connecting via serial interface.





Thanks for your help, and sorry for the bad quality of the pictures (taken from a webcam).
Looks like I have to buy a new device for managing my server needs

Regards, R.

@robertut: Thanks for your answer. You mean, I should try connecting the plug to a peripheral or floppy drive connector (5V)? I have few desktop PC power supplies unused, so I could try this. Regards, R.

Hello guys,

I own a guruplug plus server for about 10 month. I use it with plugbox linux (ArchLinux) and was all happy with that device. Until yesterday...

I "successfully" attached my unused passive heat sink from my old nvidia 5200 gfx card to the guruplug. I removed the metal plate, removed the cheap heat pads and cleaned the surfaces, added some silicone paste, reattached the metal plate and attached the heat sink to that plate. I ran stress --cpu 1 for over an hour without problems. Even filetransfer over an gbit/s ethernet network worked like a charm without rebooting (tested with only one gbit/s interface). I will try to post some photos the next days, but do not own a camera, so I might have to improvise.

But then the disillusion: Just before going to sleep, I wanted to move the whole opened device with the psu within the case to cover it from the cat, since I do not own a better case right now and with the heat sink attached, it does not fit into the whole guruplug case. Then it happened: power down. Afterwards nothing. In my opinion there are two opportunities. First, since I saw the red +5V cable from the psu was broken, I thought this might be the fail. So I tried to solder the cable to the psu. This was not successful. When supply the psu with power, the green and one of the two red leds shines, but the other red led which normally blinks is off. So I fear, I finally broke my whole device by a short-circuit while moving the device.
I will try to buy a new power supply with 5V/3A DC, but in fact, I am not really confident that this will work out.

Does anybody had a likewise problem (one green, one red led shining permanent)? Might it be possible to bring my guruplug back to work?

(I hope, this is the right thread and my English is more or less understandable)
Thanks in advance,
R.

Hi,
if you want to boot debian from the NAND you definitely need a JTAG (to erase and rewrite the NAND from u-boot environment), as well as updating the u-boot system. If you boot via a microSD or USB device, you need a way to change the u-boot environment variables, I think, this is also only possible via JTAG.

Sorry for that bad news.

Regards, ryazor

Hi guys.

I also want to enable sound functionality. So I followed the instructions in [ http://plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/USB_Audio ] by adding the lines into the guruplug_defconfig and build the kernel again. Unfortunately it seems, that the sound modules are neither built nor loaded.


Sorry, I do not have that much experience configuring alsa, since my main machine uses the OSS layer and my netbook worked out of the box using alsa. What did I overlook?

Thanks in advance,
ryazor

Edit: I don't know why, but now ALSA seems to work. Thanks!

@flipflip: Thanks for your hint, I already found that uboot argument in one of your posts :-) Do you know, if it is possible to use the UUID of a device instead of /dev/sd**? When the external HDD is connected over esata the kernel seems to map the devices different on boot ( sdb --> sdc etc.). I already tried root=/dev/disk/by-UUID/* and root=UUID=* but without success.

ryazor

@ DembK50: Nice photos, I might attach something similar to my plug, maybe with a copper board/ribs. It's a real fail of the manufacturer, that this problem is unmentioned and untreated right now, in my humble opinion.

Thanks for your posts firehawk.

I tried kernel 2.6.33.4 and 2.6.34 from that mentioned website. Unfortunately the versions seem to have a lack of esata functionality (because the sheevaplug does not have an esata interface, I guess). However, I successfully built an image for the guruplug with all the needed features.

Actually I did the steps from [ http://plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/Re-building_the_kernel_and_U-Boot ] without mention any CROSS_COMPILE arguments on the guruplug. Thanks to oinkzwurgl.org, it offers a few great and helpful notes for mastering the device.

ryazor

So they did not solve the thermal problems of the sheevaplug, which is very annoying..

Unfortunately there are no sensors within the device, so a kind software control might be impossible. I don't think, a manually added heat sink will solve the problem for longer time. So does anybody, with more hardware/electricity experience preferably, have a clue how to save life time of our babies ;-)

Regards,
ryazor

You might use the 'chown' command. Find out the lighttpd user in your /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf (server.username) and alter the error.log with 'chown lighttpd /mnt/sda/var/log/lighttpd/error.log'. You could avoid such problems by copying recursive and in preserve-mode (cp -rp /var /tmp /mnt/sda1).

Regards,
ryazor

Thank you very much firehawk! I just wrote the kernel to the NAND at these addresses, but from FAT32 USB device. I used the following command, instead of the 'tftp' line:

I already recognized, that unfortunately the 'mmc' and the 'ext2load' commands are still lacking in this version of uboot. However, I'm now able to boot my previous configured debian.

I will now try to load the rootfs from SD.

Edit: I did not figure out how to load the rootfs from the microSD device right now. It always aborts booting with a kernel panic (not syncing). It tells, I have to correct the root parameter, and I got only mtdblock0 - 2 as available options. Although, a few lines above, it prints out 'mmc0: new high speed SDIO card at address 0001'. So I tried 'setenv x_bootargs_root root=/dev/mmc0' and '/dev/sdb1' (which is the SD card when booted from NAND). Could you give me a hint, where my fault is? :-)

Edit 2: Sorry for editing again. I found the solution, it is posted in this thread: http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=1642.0#msg10009 .

Thanks again,
ryazor

@ Mimoza: Thanks for your reply, I did the u-boot upgrade process described at cyrius.com with the USB method and I think I just bricked my plug 
I could imagine, that the addresses described for the sheevaplug are invalid for the guruplug:
But in fact I have no idea, whether this is correct or not. This is what now happens after I wrote the uboot image from plugcomputer.org (md5 d60aff3db94132d611413efab31ce373: uboot.guruplug.bin) and reset the plug:


And that was it.. The kernel seems to be uncompressed but not bootable.. Any suggestions?

Thanks and regards,
ryazor

Same here!

I got my guru-plus few days ago and now want to boot the previous installed debian filesystem from NAND which I copied to an ext2 formatted microSD card from this microSD device. See: http://plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/SD_Card_As_Root_File_System

As firehawk pointed out, the default u-boot from the guruplug does not either offer 'mmc' nor 'ext2load' (version: 2009-11-rc1-00602-g28a9c08-dirty), so I'm enforced to compile a new u-boot for the plug.

The Link firehawk posted in his second point seems to be exactly the solution we need, but in this wiki article every CROSS_COMPILE argument is listed as a variable (<cross_compiler_prefix>), now I'm wondering which is the right value to this parameter (I use Arch Linux [2.6.33] as host system).

Thanks and regards,
ryazor

ArchLinux on plug? Great!
Does anybody have experience, running this solution on a guru-plus? I would like to know, if there might be any issues, e.g. with esata, wireless or the like.

@ mikestaszel: thumbs up!


Regards!