PfSense on a Riverbed Steelhead

[Okijames]

@stephenw10 @cjohnson M.2 NVME, I have a in a PCIE extension cable thingie. PCIE edgecard -> short cable -> M.2 socket. It "works" in that the NVME drive is recognized by ESXi, as a PCI device, but not as a storage adapter. ESXI can pass it through to a VM, but I can't use it as local shared storage for the hypervisor.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TKYMQXZ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

PS, it is a 1TB NVME so a bit much to pass through just for pfSense :)

[mjamesPFS]

@freska99

I was wondering if you ever got this running on your 1050?

I trying to to the same and tying to understand the steps you took.

I was able to use a USB thumb drive and install PfSense 2.5.1 on a an internal HD but none of my interfaces work including em4 and em5 which should be the Primary and Aux interfaces.

[stephenw10]

Like not detected or not passing traffic?

The non-bypassed ports should show link at least.

[mjamesPFS]

@stephenw10,

Thank you for the quick reply. Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you. I finally had some time yesterday to take another look. Turns out I had a bad vLAN setting on my lab switch. I now have access to PFSense from the web interface and SSH. I still need to figure out how access the other network interfaces but for now I have the primary and aux interfaces working.

B/R.
Mike

[foureight84]

@okijames Did you ever find newer bios for this board? I've been having issues using newer SATA SSDs due to the old bios. Most of them do not detect the correct capacity (1GB instead of 128GB for example).

I don't have access to the Riverbed support page for this product since it requires an active license.

[Okijames]

@foureight84 I asked my contacts still working at Riverbed, and they confirmed there is no newer bios. FWIW I don't use SSDs because of a number of the packages I use write to the disk pretty heavily. In my case at least, the SSD would wear too quickly so I opted for HDD instead. Because of this I've not encountered the issue you're seeing.

[foureight84]

@okijames Thanks for the reply and confirmation! For now I've been using MLC SSDs (new old stocks that I can find) in ZFS mirror. That should last a long time. I'm not using doing any packet captures, just mostly default logs which is minimal. I was just hoping to be able to use larger drives later on in case I want to turn it into a Proxmox box instead.

[Okijames]

@foureight84 FWIW Proxmox is even worse when it comes to wearing out SSDs. :)

That and for whatever reason the 770 (with a Xeon E3-1125C v2 CPU so 4cores at 2.5Ghz) is almost embarrassingly slow at running VMs under Proxmox. I have one stacked with 32GB RAM, running Proxmox, and really disappointed in VM performance. It is so bad, I think something must be misconfigured, but can't find anything glaring.

[foureight84]

@okijames haha I thought it would be. It's a pretty old CPU at this point.

[Okijames]

@foureight84 Yup, on the plus side it is a solid/reliable machine. So I use it for a few lightweight things that need to run 24/7 without a hiccup.

[stephenw10]

Hmm, it's not that old. Just how terrible is the performance?

[Okijames]

@stephenw10 Reminds me of 486 performance. Then again I'm basing that on my experience with a Windows VM. So maybe the lack of any sort of video card in the system is the real culprit?

[stephenw10]

Could be. Current Windows versions seem to have pretty significant hardware requirements.

[pantigon]

Please help me.....

root: smbmsg -p
Probing for devices on /dev/smb0:
Device @0x10: w
Device @0x32: rw
Device @0x46: rw
Device @0x4c: rw
Device @0x5a: w
Device @0x5c: rw
Device @0x62: rw
Device @0x7c: rw
Device @0x88: rw
Device @0xa2: rw
Device @0xac: rw
Device @0xd2: rw
Device @0xd8: rw

What is "smbmsg" code?
Thanks.

[stephenw10]

What hardware is that?

[pantigon]

@stephenw10
This is Riverbed CXA-255.

[stephenw10]

The list we had from the file in this thread only lists devices by the motherboard part number like '400-00300-01'. You'll probably need to find that.

[Okijames]

@pantigon I've not tried a CXA-255, but based on the chassis, it might have BIOS control of the bypass NICs like 570/770 boxes. Meaning you won't have to fiddle with smbus settings. Take a look through the BIOS options and search for bypass NIC settings. I don't remember for sure, but I think they need to be set to "disable".

[Okijames]

@pantigon I should have clarified. The LAN/WAN NICs should be enabled, but then disable the "bypass" feature.

As a reminder, the bypass feature causes the LAN/WAN ports to act like a wired crossover coupler when the box is powered off.

[Okijames]

@pantigon I was poking around with my CX-770 today, and the BIOS setting for the bypass NICS should be set to "No Bypass". Your's might be the same.