Death Road

The Most Dangerous Road is located here in Bolivia. It's small road and at the moment only connection from La Paz via Corioco to Brazil. The goverment has been constructing a new road, but at the time it's snot ready yet. The death toll is around 250 persons in that 40 kilometer strip.

Here in La Paz are several companies of which are arranging day-trips including the bike, transport and food for the day. I checked two, Downhill Madness and Gravity, both located in same building on downtown.

I choosed the Gravity based on the positive stories found from internet and they also had similar Kona as I have now at home. Gravity was a bit more expensive than the DH Madness, but not much. The trip needs to booked at least one day advance, so i booked my trip on saturday.

On sunday morning we left from near of their office by bus to the mountains, climbed up to +4000 meters where was the time to get biked down from the bus and put biking gears on.
They offer basically everything, but I had my own stuff with me so I used mainly those.

When booking the trip, I got understanding that it's serious driving and guides are real professional bikers, there was DH racing videos playing in the office etc..

The biggets surprise was that 90% people participating to the trip hasn't touch bike since teen years. So in this point I realized that it was regular tourist day trip, not real mountain biking trip as advertised.
The chief guide, Gooey started to keep lessons how to drive with a bike etc...
Worst surprise was that they hade removed the biggest chain-wheels from the front, so there was not even theorical possibility to get speed with those bikes.
The full-suspension was totally not needed in this track and for me it looked just like a marketing trick to get money out from stupid tourists.
They also marketed that all bikes are fine tuned perfectly, like their own bikes. I don't know how those guys adjust the bikes but I needed to re-adjust the gears totally.

Ok, we started to drive the road, first 20 kilometers was mainly down-hill on asfalt continuing with 5 kilometers uphill. The funniest part was that almost have of the participants used bus for that instead of biking it.

After that we had small brake where they offered some chocolate bars and banana. This was the point where the Death Road started... Gooey kept short briefing about how to ride since there was left side traffic on use, so vehicles going down uses the outer side of the road.

The road was more or less what I expected, muddy road with out any protection to drop down from the edge. There was more or less 100 meters direct drop right after the road, so I really wanted to drop... Mianly the road was dry, but there was some slipery parts and my bikes rear tyre was almost finnish, so needed to take carafully those corners.

There was lot's of truck on that road and they are really using it for ground transport. I don't understand who they have "only" 250 deads in there...

I was mainly driving with the first guy, there was another group behind us including three guys but rest were coming down more or less slow. Two girls was sitting in the bus for whole road.

It took more or less 4 hours to get down since we had several stops during the road, including one longer where they offered some sandwitches and softdrinks.

At the down we were supposed to have launch in the hotel including several hours in the pool. That was they were saying still on saturday when they sold the trip, but what happened, there was a luch in some backyard full of fiting dogs and monkeys. No pool. And the food wasn't anything special.
Funniest thing is that they are giving a way a brochure about the Bolivia were they told than it's not good to eat from the kiosks from the streets since the hygienia is not good, for me this "restaurant" looked more or less like those kiosks in the La Paz streets.

On the brochure, there was also note about free beer as soon as we get down to the Coroico, sure there was, two classes and later they charged five start restaurant price after You had drinked it.

Last but not least, they were selling CD including "high-rez" images from the road. I bought the CD with 5 dollars, and it sure wasn't worth it.

The views were awesome and the DH was fun, but the service was regular "tourist class", nothing special.

Debian on Dell Power Edge 1950

The new Dell Power Edge is a bit tricky to get working with the Debian due it's SAS disks.

First step is to get the latest etch installation image, I was using this.

- Start the installation as usually
- Go through all menus and set values corresponding to Your environment.
- Partition the disk as You want
- Configure network
- Install the base system
- Configure the APT
- Finnish the installation normally

Now comes the "special part"
- Boot again with the installation disk
- Continue the installation until it asks about the partitioning stuff
- Click back twice to return installation menu
- Open console with "ctrl + alt + f2"
- Make new dir "mkdir /target"
- Mount it "mount /dev/sda1 /target"
- If all are not in one partition, mount the sys to the target "mount /sys /target/sys"
- Chroot to the target "chroot /target"
- Mount needed folders, at least "mount proc" and I had var on own, so "mount /var"
- Make sure that You have network connectivity and /etc/apt/source.list with correct peers
- Update the package list "apt-get update"
- Since we have very base system installed, you need to get some more packages, run "apt-get install yaird initrd-tools sudo ssh"
- Good time to update the kernel to the latest, I used linux-image-2.6.18-1-686-bigmem_2.6.18-1_i386.deb
- Install the new kernel "dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.18-1-686-bigmem_2.6.18-1_i386.deb"
- Change to your boot directory "cd /boot"
- The installation created an initrd.img- 2.6.18-1-686-bigmem, I deleted it before running YAIRD to avoid conflicts
- Run "yaird --output initrd.img-linux-image-2.6.18-1-686-bigmem 2.6.18-1-686-bigmem"
-Add to /etc/kernel-img.conf following items:
ramdisk = /usr/sbin/mkinitrd.yaird
- Add to /etc/mkinitrd/modules following modules:
scsi_mod
mptbase
mptsas
mptscsih
sd_mod
Add to /etc/modules following items:
ide-cd
ide-disk
ide-generic
mptbase
mptscsih
mptsas

Reboot and You should have working Power Edge with Linux !