Thanks for reminding me what hoba said earlier in this thread.
No, I did not have a serial cable plugged up.
I tried to figure out how to connect a PC monitor to the serial port :-[
and then I remembered something I read about m0n0wall on a Soekris and a serial port,
here: http://doc.m0n0.ch/quickstartsoekris/ under 3.2. Connecting to the Soekris serial console.
The null modem cable that I used had only pins 2 and 3 crossed, for the rest it was
different than the null modem cables described in http://www.nullmodem.com/NullModem.htm .
However, with HyperTerminal under Windows XP and the following settings, 2400 bits per second,
8 data bits, parity none, stop bits 1 and flow control hardware, I got some garbled output in the
HyperTerminal window.
Then I changed to the speed to 19200 bps, still garbled output. Finally I found here
http://www.fozzee.net/wrap/ that the default speed in m0n0wall is 9600 bps. When I entered
that in HyperTerminal for the serial connection to the router, I finally got the non-garbled boot
messages in the HyperTerminal window.
pfSense rocks. Thanks for making it. I like the traffic shaper very much.