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Talos II / Talos User's Survival Kit/New Talos User's Shopping List
« on: November 25, 2019, 12:33:42 pm »
I decided to figure out a quick list of things that are good to have or nice to have that can make Talos ownership a little easier for people who are planning to buy one but don't quite know what they're getting.
It's my goal with posting this thread to assemble, with community input, a comprehensive "Talos User's Survival Kit" or some kind of a strongly opinionated shopping list which will contain the absolute bare minimum of equipment, in both e that a Talos user or a future Talos user could ever need to set up and maintain their computer, and then I could open up a new page on the wiki for it.
I know that I had to pick up and assemble my kit piece by piece by piece, and in many circumstances I was lucky to be able to have stuff lying around that I could repurpose (I also owe a deep debt of gratitude to the rest of the IRC channel for helping me through it), but I was thinking to help newcomers it might be a good idea to have a "Talos User's Shopping List" to have ready in advance that we could point to that would have everything they could need so they could prepare ahead of time. I was thinking the following items:
Day To Day Upkeep and Use
What do you guys think so far?
It's my goal with posting this thread to assemble, with community input, a comprehensive "Talos User's Survival Kit" or some kind of a strongly opinionated shopping list which will contain the absolute bare minimum of equipment, in both e that a Talos user or a future Talos user could ever need to set up and maintain their computer, and then I could open up a new page on the wiki for it.
I know that I had to pick up and assemble my kit piece by piece by piece, and in many circumstances I was lucky to be able to have stuff lying around that I could repurpose (I also owe a deep debt of gratitude to the rest of the IRC channel for helping me through it), but I was thinking to help newcomers it might be a good idea to have a "Talos User's Shopping List" to have ready in advance that we could point to that would have everything they could need so they could prepare ahead of time. I was thinking the following items:
Day To Day Upkeep and Use
- Multiple USB 3.0 Hub
- USB Soundcard
- PCI-e SATA card
Cards with the Marvell 88SE9215 SATA controller have been tested and work great, and Petitboot can boot an OS from them without needing tweaks, firmware blobs, or additional drivers to be installed. There are versions of the card that have up to 8 ports which makes it a pretty good deal. I figured this would be a good recommendation to throw in off the bat since I don't know many people that use SAS drives on their computers. - PCI-e to M2 Riser
- BMC Serial Header
- 9-pin Serial Cable
- RS-232 to USB adapter
These three items seem necessary to connect to the BMC COM port. If I recall right the Talos uses the DTK/Intel standard, which is easily recognized by the cables alternating between pins, rather than being connected in order. There's more on the Wiki page here: https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Talos_II/Building_FAQ#BMC_serial_port_J7701 - An old laptop running Coreboot or Libreboot as a Hardware Monitoring Console, or a Terminal.
Since the BMC doesn't have its own dedicated graphics card output, I just communicate with it using an old X200 laptop running OpenBSD. For extra security, it may be best to ensure that the HMC can't talk to any other networks, so I removed the wifi card. I noticed that OpenBSD comes with a lot of stuff necessary to talk to the BMC but I haven't been able to figure this out yet, since unfortunately at this time the Serial header I have is the wrong type, so if anyone else has any information on that please let me know. - Six foot ethernet cable.
Looks like the BMC supports autonegotiation for talking to the HMC over the ethernet, so a dedicated crossover cable is not necessary. - Bus Pirate or SPI flash programmer
- Bus Pirate Cable and 300-mil SOIC-16 Programmer Socket
Something to bear in mind with this is that currently I've bought a couple SOIC-16 sockets and clips, but they're the wrong size. I think I'm going to need to find measurements or something like that, since I need to figure out which ones fit. Please let me know.
What do you guys think so far?
