Successful Install on Watchguard Firebox X700!

jahonix

Figured as much really as the Linksys cables are straight-thru cables.

Then they have the connectors wrong!
Null-modem cable should be {DB9-female - DB9-female} and
straight through should be {DB9-female - DB9-male} making it an extension.

Everything else is proprietary.

emigrating

Well, to be perfectly honest - that's not the only thing they have wrong :) Took me a good while to flash the SRW2016s to an acceptable firmware which actually included all the features they were advertised as having. Good switches once that was done though.

Oh well, nullmodem cable on it's way now. Grabbed a 5GB microdrive also to see if that'll be recognized so guess I'm shelfing the project for a couple more days.

Hmm, whilst I'm at it - anyone got ideas on a mini-pci wifi card I could stick in it?

GruensFroeschli

I preferr this card http://pcengines.ch/wlm54g23.htm or this card http://pcengines.ch/wlm54sag23.htm depending on if i need 802.11a support or not.
I never had problems with them :)
(except on pfSense 1.0 but that was because of a bad client)…

Sifter

Again, has anyone upgraded the memory on these boxes and gotten it to see the additional? I placed a 512meg module in the box, and it still registers at 256meg. I tried 2 separate sticks.

Perhaps jumper settings somewhere on the board?

Sifter

Anyone have any updates? Such as successful additional memory, no more watchdog timeouts, installs on a microdrive?

drvcrash

I have a 512 stick in one of mine and it sees it all. make sure you have pc133 ram. I also have a 80 gig 2.5in laptop drive in it running the full install

Dayblade

@Sifter:

Again, has anyone upgraded the memory on these boxes and gotten it to see the additional? I placed a 512meg module in the box, and it still registers at 256meg. I tried 2 separate sticks.

Perhaps jumper settings somewhere on the board?

Upgraded it to 512 MB just this week:

Kingston KVR100x64C2/512 512MB PC100 CL2

Also changed out the heatsink and fan - that is the MAJORITY of the noise factor in the x700 - they use a fan designed by Y.S. Tech (?) that was pushing 7200+ RPM's. I switched and installed a lower/larger fan combo @ 5500 RPM's and temps dropped by 10C and the noise is SUBJECTIVELY quieter.
(Granted I did not test decibel levels prior to the fan switch out)

Hope that helps - <3 pfSense on my WatchGuard btw - still working on getting the LCD to do its thang…otherwise, it works like a champ.

Dayblade

emigrating

Updates…

Well, it's not booting from the 5GB microdrive I picked up (although to be honest, I never expected it to). Stuck a 4GB drive in there and it's chugging along nicely though. (PoI: the LCD displayed a very basic BIOS setup selection when I stuck the 5GB drive in there).

Also picked up a Atheros mini-pci wificard on eBay (not the one recommended) which seems to be working fine, although it's not much in use yet.

As for timeouts, I've had none on the WAN, LAN1, LAN2 or WiFi port. LAN3 gets the occasional dropout, but nothing that worries me too much. Since the last reboot (2 weeks ago) it's logged 17 drops on the dashboard which doesn't seem bad at all.

Haven't got the LCD to display anything yet, although haven't spent too much time on it.

Also haven't upgraded the memory, but it's currently running at around 30% utilization so not really necessary at this point.

All this with a 24/3Mbps connection. Oh, running the 1.3 alpha builds.

CryoGenID

Wow what a great thing ;D

The question I now have is:
Does this also work with a FireBox Core x750e ?
I have one standing around here and would like to use it with pfSense…
It has a lot of CPU-Power, 8 GBit-Ports...

I have just tried to boot the Live-CD, install it onto a normal ATA-HDD and
plug that one into the standard IDE-Port of the Firebox and connect via
Serial-Port to my PC...
But unfortunately I don't see anything on HyperTerminal.

If you connect your Firebox and for example don't put any HDD's/CF-Cards
into your box do you see anything via the serial connection?

Thanks a lot for your help!

I hope we can get this running ;D

Best regards,

Chris

CryoGenID

Update:

I have just read the part (missed it somehow in the first place) with the
Linksys-Serial-Cable (with which I tried it g), so I have now used
another serial-cable (in German: "Nullmodemkabel"), but I only
get scrambled output (see attached picture) from the original
Watchguard-CF-Card.

Does anybody know what is wrong here?

I've tried to change the handshake (Hardware, none), speed (9600, 19800, 56000)…

But I always get this scrambled output...

Help please ;)

Thanks and best regards,

Chris

WG_1.jpg_thumb

jahonix

First, forget about HyperTerminal and get TeraTerm Pro:
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.html

Looks like you're using wrong emulation.

GruensFroeschli

Also did you make sure that your flow control is set to "none" and NOT to hardware or Xon/Xoff

CryoGenID

Thanks for your replies!

I've just solved it…
It was the speed of the serial console, I had to set it to 115200...
If I used a slower speed, only that garbage could be seen... Now I can see it :-)

I'll now try to get pfsense working on it :-)

Thanks again!!!

Best regards,

Chris

CryoGenID

Ok, Update again:
It is really depressing…
Using the original Watchguard-CF-Card I can see the Serial Output, but NO Output from
pfSense :-(
I have tried the liveCD and used the embedded kernel and have also tried to flash the
embedded image via physdiscwrite...
If I attach the CF-Card to a Vmware-VM, I can see the BootLoader booting and then
(of course) nothing more as it switches to serial console output...
But using the FireBox, I get nothing at all via the serial port (using 115200 and 9800 bps)...
The Display of the FB says "Booting OS...." ...

Do you have any other thoughts to get this finally running? :-)

Thanks and best regards,

Chris

emigrating

Do you not get any serial output at all from the x700?

Did you install the embedded or normal image? I just installed the standard image on my microdrive, changed the bootloader and fstab slightly (as detailed earlier in the thread) and away it went.

Could be the card you're using isn't compatible with the firebox - as noted in one of my previous posts, I had a 5GB card that just would not work (and the LCD would show some bios settings).

CryoGenID

Hey :-)

I installed both images and selected the embedded kernel when I used the normal image…

But I don't get any output at all...

But this is a X1250e, and not a X700 ;-)

I am using a 2 GB CF-Card... But I could try to use another 1 GB Card and see what happens ;-)

Any other ideas?

I gues noone has a schematic for a VGA and KB-Cable (for which the Mainboard of the X1250e
has connectors)?

Thanks and best regards,

Chris

2low4zero

I've been catching up on this thread and doing some of my own experimentation. I've installed PFSense 1.2 and 1.2.1 on an X700 using an 8GB Transcend 2.5" SSD, a 30GB Fujita 2.5" HDD, and a SanDisk 128MB CF card. I have the following questions and observations to pose to the group;

-The SafeNet crypto accelerator isn't recognised by the OS at this point. Anyone have any success stories here?

-The Soekris VPN1411 (HiFN 7955) is recognized but fails to load. (I have saved the output of 'dmesg' if anyone is interested in how the hifn is failing.) Again, any success stories?

-Any success stories regarding fan replacement on the processor so that it doesn't sound like a 747 preparing to taxi?

-Anyone have any positive experiences with Mini-PCI type III form factor wireless cards that are recognized by FreeBSD7? I'm thinking of salvaging an Atheros ar45xx mini-pci card out of a WG X15 Edge box and placing it in the X700.

-For that matter, has anyone successfully reprogrammed the TSOP (Intel Flash) on an X15 to take an embedded load? Or is the BIOS on that box hopelessly borked? I have two X15s and they look hopeless shy of scavenging the Atheros wireless cards and antennae out of them…

-My preference is still a mini-tower piece-o-crap HP destop P4 2.x GHz box for best price/size/performance ratio. The WG X700 is still too pricey unless you can score one on eBay for 50 bucks.

Also, the performance difference between FreeBSD5/6 and FreeBSD7 is gi-normous. Good call to update the OS in the PFSense 1.2.1 tree. The differences on the X700 running even a simple home network are quite noticeable. FreeBSD7 is back to where it was, performance-wise, in the 4.x days. Thanks guys. Again, good call.

Which brings up one more thing: Watchdog timeouts. I had problems with watchdog timeouts on FreeBSD 5.4, 6.1, and 6.3 using only IPF, not PFSense, for many many months. FreeBSD7 seems better about this than the 6 tree did. But here's something to consider; While switching infrastructure and cable lengths are important, please consider keeping track of the interface types that have these problems. I've had problems with dc0, rl0, xl0, bge0, em0, and fxp0, but mostly with dc[0|1|2|3] on the Xilinx (sp?) quad ethernet cards. Cisco/LinkSys gear seems better behaved in this area but the Joe Itchiban / Suzi Won / off-brand switching gear always seems to cause problems with watchdog timeouts. Just my 2 cents. (Yeah, I know, this is probably in the wrong place…)

One last thing: The slow PFSense management traffic on em0 or em1 appears to be a reproducible event for me, even on non-Intel hardware. Ethernet chipsets are the key here. (Again, wrong thread.)

Okay, so... all of that said, who's interested in more experimentation and what would you like to see done next? I'm sticking with PFSense 1.2.1 going forward, but what other embedded systems and hardware would YOU like to see explored? I'm about ready to move on from the X700 to something else unless I can cut the noise and increase the performance, perhaps with a processor upgrade. Adding the Atheros WiFi card and drilling holes in the back for antennae might be fun to do. But WHAT ELSE could I do with an X700?!?

Thanks for listening, all. Feel free to contact me about my above ramblings if you are so moved.

MMan

One successfull install on X750. Wrote embedded image on original 128mb cf card and it booted fine. Everything seems to work properly so far and even lcd driver for x700 works.

Now I feel tempted to replace original Celeron M 320 with Pentium M 780. ;D

@CryoGenID:

But this is a X1250e, and not a X700 ;-)

X1250 should be identical to X750. So it should work too. I did have small problem with front bezel preventing serial cable to go deep enough.

Darkk

@GruensFroeschli:

I preferr this card http://pcengines.ch/wlm54g23.htm or this card http://pcengines.ch/wlm54sag23.htm depending on if i need 802.11a support or not.
I never had problems with them :)
(except on pfSense 1.0 but that was because of a bad client)…

What about Atheros 5212? I have one running in my PC with PFSense 1.2.1 RC2 and seems to be working ok but getting alot of errors so not sure if it's related to this model or not.

Darkk

gpouser

Would it be possible to see inside Pic(I will get some of the inside if anyone is interested) plus power supply type.

Found these pictures from other pages - was clicking next page