Moving Linux Harddrive to another system

Hy all,

I have a Intrusion.com PDS 2300 system. It has a standard CPU, harddrive, motherboard/chipset etc.

It was basically intended to be a firewall, but it has no video/keyboard/mouse.

The only way to communicate with it is either through the net or through a serial port.

I'm basically trying to salvage it and install Linux on it, however I believe the serial port may be dead.

I'm thinking of removing the standard 2.5'' harddrive and installing a distro on it, configuring a web interface for it and then switching it back.

Does anyone have any ideas which distro might be best suited to it? Or of a distro even a distro that has its installation set to automatically output to serial port?

Thanks a lot.

Xel

There're a couple of solutions I can think of.
Depends on what you want to use it for.
You can either setup linux on another PC and configure it to output to serial and then move the drive to the PDS, you can add VGA to your PDS, or you can install m0n0wall on it.

The easiest...
Is to setup linux on another computer and configure it to output to serial.
This may vary from distro to distro.
I personally used slackware.
Here's a site explaining changing the output to serial.
http://www.techfinesse.com/wdupre1/net4801/SoekrisSlack.php
Should be able to follow step 5.
I tried this at first, but didn't stick with it for long.

I chose to put VGA on my PDS. (I like seeing things)
Here's pictures of someone else's PDS.
http://www.nullsense.net/Gallery/index.php?dir=/Projects/PDS2315
I actually de-soldered a vga connector from an old video card, soldered it on, cut a hole in the back panel and made it look like it's had VGA from the factory.
It's rather simple if you know how to solder and it works great!
But be warned, you can screw it up!

One more solution..
If you're planning on keeping this PDS to use as a firewall, you can load up m0n0wall (http://m0n0.ch/wall) on a CF card (or hard drive).
From what I've seen, all the PDSs have built in CF sockets (FYI, Secondary slave).
It fits on an 8mb CF card.
This is what I'm currently running on my PDS. (Generic PC image)
I'm not sure if VGA is required to install this as I had already soldered on the port by the time I found this software and don't remember if I used the VGA port or not.
I've been running this for a few months now.
This is the best solution I've found so far.
It does damn near everything I want and it's easy to setup.

Hope this helps, if this seems like too much work or you just want to get rid your PDS, let me know.
I'm interested in getting another PDS or two for other projects.

This is exactly the info I have been needing for my PDS appliances as well. I have 3 different models, and want to install gentoo on them. Was there a place to directly solder a ps2 keyboard connection on there too?

Hey Xel02,

Have you configured your host computer to 38400, 8,n,1 and no flow control? These are the specs directly from Intrusion.com.