NOkIA ip330 works great

jzsjr · Feb 14, 2006, 8:49 PM

How do you like our rebranded IP330?

hoba · Feb 14, 2006, 9:01 PM

Very nice! I like it :)

jzsjr · Feb 15, 2006, 12:52 PM

Bweyr,

Have you noticed that the halt command does not power the IP330 down? I can hear the hdd click like it is parking the head but the unit will not power off. Is this a limitation on the Nokia hardware?

thanks,
Jim

hoba · Feb 15, 2006, 1:00 PM

I don't know if the nokia has a similiar setting like the nexcom, but I had to make a special setting at the nexcom to make reboots and powerdowns available. I documented what is needed here: http://www.mail-archive.com/support@pfsense.com/msg03811.html
Also try disabling ACPI and check the Bios for powermanagementspecific settings.

jzsjr · Feb 15, 2006, 3:03 PM

Not really sure how to enter bios via console cable if it is even possible. Another question, Does the auto mac address assigner happen every time the machine is booted up? Can I go ahead and manually assign the fake mac addresses to the nics to it does not have to do this?

thanks,
Jim

jzsjr · Feb 15, 2006, 3:57 PM

I've been reading on how to get into the bios of the ip330 and I guess we still do not have a real null cable modem. Amazing that we do not have this. After the AT comes up we do not see anything from the machine until the freebsd starts to boot up. I have ordered some null cables so we'll just have to wait till they come in.

thanks,
Jim

hoba · Feb 15, 2006, 4:10 PM

Try teraterm http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.html
I use this to enter WRAP, Nexcom and other BIOSes. It has a break-function in the Dropdownmenu Control>Send break or just use ALT+B alternativly. Sometimes this works where other terminal emulations don't work. Send the break before the machine actually starts to boot.

jzsjr · Feb 17, 2006, 11:55 PM

Update. The cable we found to access the nokia IP330 was not a true null modem cable. It allowed us to see when the freebsd fired up but nothing of the bios initial boot. Our null modems finally came in on Thursday and we were able to see the entire boot process and enter the bios. There is not much there and no power management. I don't think the power supplies are ATX so there will be no hardware halt (no big deal). I am running our first rebranded nokia ip330 at my house and it seems fine. Andy, a colleague, has order two K6-2 500mhz to replace the current K6-2 266mhz that came with our used ip330s. These seem much better to play around with than the Nortel Contivity 100 boxes we got.

thanks,
Jim

Sifter · Feb 28, 2006, 12:48 AM

Does the IP330 have any special encryption accelleration build into it? For some reason in the back of my mind I thought it did, could be wrong tho.

gluesniffined · Mar 1, 2006, 8:06 AM

@jzsjr:

Got it going and it auto assigned mac addresses to the nics. Very nice touch from the pfsense team.

thanks,
Jim

Am I correct in assuming, based on your post, that I no longer have to manually add the <spoofmac>tag to the xml config file? I have been using an IP330 for a while now and I have always had to add the <spoofmac>tags for each interface or all of my interfaces come up as ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff</spoofmac></spoofmac>

hoba · Mar 2, 2006, 6:55 PM

correct, pfSense will add some fake mac-adresses to interfaces showing non valid macs automagically.

CWHO · Mar 28, 2006, 7:44 AM

Also a note if you are reading this thread and having problems. I did the dig through the old box O cables thing and found one that seemed to work. Mine brought up the POST screen but keep looping through the bios setup again and again. After much frustration I discovered that this is a known problem with some NOKIA and some cable/terminal programs. The dirty solution is just to hot patch the serial after boot…..

KiaN · Apr 28, 2006, 8:33 AM

Having the choice between an unused IP330 and a 1U Pentium 4 @ 2Hz for pfSense, I wonder what would be the best. It would be for a 100Mbits WAN. Could the IP330 handle that easily with pfSense ? I also have an unused Watchguard Firebox II but I wonder if it would work fine, and it seems difficults to setup with pfSense.

sullrich · Apr 28, 2006, 5:57 PM

Go with the 2ghz box. The IP330s are a glorified older pc maxing out at 500mhz IIRC.

Criggie · Apr 29, 2006, 1:29 AM

Well I finally got my ip330

Lots of learning going on. Firstly, pay attention to the specs if you're buying one. Mine came with Intel Pentium 166 CPUs which are bloody slow, and make the whole machine feel very sludgy. The web suggests that an AMD K6 II clocked at 266 MHz is the standard CPU. However there are some with K6 II at 500 and 550 MHz, but those ones have a special shroud covering the CPU and one of the cooling fans to make a wind tunnel.

I simply replaced the 64 Mb SDRAM with a 256 Mb SDRAM without problems. My ones had a 4.3 Gb IDE Western Digital drive whereas most documentation says an 8 Gb IDE drive.

There is a compact PCI slot on the left - note its nothing like a normal PCI slot. There's also a hidden RJ45ish plug on the front and a space in the rear for some kind of module.

Things I haven't got working right - the serial console. I have a normal null modem cable which works for booting, but does not allow me to access the BIOS. I also don't get a console menu despide dmesg reporting

sio0 at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on isa0
sio0: type 16550A, console

Thats a work in progress. Also I changed /etc/platform to say "wrap" which is supposed to mount the CF card read-only (but didn't) and minimise writes to the CF card.

Now in relation to installing… The IP330 has a generic AWARD BIOS and can apparently boot from CD. You can use a normal 2 port IDE cable and a molex Y power splitter to run a normal CDROM and the internal drive all at once. I have not got this to work cos I can't get to the BIOS.

I put the drive into another PC and tried to install pfSense from the 1.0 Beta3 installer but that failed to detect a drive. Nokia may have done something screwey with the drives. So I simply drilled four holes and mounted my IDE/CF card reader in the same spot. Works a treat except I had more interfaces in the old firewall and so opt5 became opt1, and I had to recreate rules and so on. I should have edited a backup xml and reuploaded it, but didn't think of that till later.

On my other one I used a spare hard drive that was lying around and that installed fine on a normal PC. However I failed to set up NICs and IPs with that one, and it doesn't have a serial console enabled either, so I have to move the drive to a normal box and then modify config.xml manually.

I've got stacks of pictures at http://criggie.dyndns.org/tech/ip330/

So, my unresolved questions:

How to enable serial console on the PC platform?
How to enable read-only mode for the CF card?
What CPU shall I install for "More Power"?
What is the strange hidden RJ45ish plug on the front for?
What is the rear connector for?
Does anyone have a spare cPCI card for testing?

Criggie · May 5, 2006, 11:37 PM

Seems that polling is a bad thing on this machine.

CPU states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 1.5% system, 47.5% interrupt, 51.0% idle
With polling enabled on all three NICs

CPU states: 0.4% user, 0.0% nice, 3.1% system, 3.1% interrupt, 93.4% idle
With polling disabled.

Anyone got any ideas?
–-
Later... Turns out that really low spec CPUs do not benefit from polling.

Criggie · May 1, 2006, 9:16 AM

Got serial console working too now. I had to change "off" to "on" in /etc/ttys for the line starting ttyd0

No idea why "serial console" didn't show up under the advanced tab.

hoba · May 1, 2006, 12:18 PM

It won't show up for embedded systems as those have the serial console enabled by default.

Criggie · May 3, 2006, 7:36 AM

@hoba:

It won't show up for embedded systems as those have the serial console enabled by default.

Okay fair enough - still it didn't actually turn on the serial console.

My next issue is the CPU upgrade. I bought and installed an AMD K6 II at 450 MHz, but the system has no jumpers to change the clock speed or the multiplier. So I've lost a F00F bug and gained two AMD MTRRs, but its still running at 166 MHz.

Silkscreened on the board is a table of multipliers, but they refer to BF0 BF1 and BF2 which are not to be found. Does anyone have any ideas about this? I'm not adverse to doing some soldering, but I don't know what to solder :)

rsw686 · May 9, 2006, 12:43 AM

Yeah I too ended up with a 166 mhz model. I looked and looked for the jumpers and I can't figure it out. I pulled the plastic covering with the writing off the front, it was partially coming off anyways and I wanted to paint the whole unit black. To get to the point that the connector to the right of the 3 rj45 connectors is a modem. On the board there is a jumper between the serial port and the modem so you can select which one is used. I have a stick of 256mb memory to swap for the 64mb in there eventually, but I wanted to swap the cpu at the same time. If you figure it be sure to post.

As far as the bios options, if you plug the null modem cable into the console port (bottom one) it will show the bootup screen and say press (i think its f2) to enter the bios. You have to open hyperterminal, etc first and connect, then turn on the ip330. I don't even use the serial port on the front. With the default options from installing the pfsense embedded image to the cf flash card I can see the pfsense menu through the console port (same with monowall that I had installed before). Suspossedly the ip330 does a vga to text conversion.

I like pfsense alot, but if I didn't need the nat reflection (only 1 public ip and multiple servers) I would switch back to monowall for the ip330 box. Pfsense is alot slower than monowall, but I like the features it offers.

Heres a few pics. BTW, you know where to get a set of mounting ears for a netgear switch? I bought them both used off ebay and the gigabit one didn't come with the rack mount ears :-/ Mine had a T1 compact pci card but I removed that. I'm probably going to put some sort of sticker over the hole, or make a new cover out a some scrap metal.