Successful Install on Watchguard Firebox X700!

Sifter

So which out of this list would qualify?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010170147%201052107967%201052407863%20105233066&name=512MB%20-%201GB

Sifter

Anyone?

MMan

@Sifter:

Anyone?

I have Kingston KVR133X64C3/512 in X700 and it works fine. :)

tehtrk

@drallibor:

More info on the keyboard connector
This place isnt far from me. http://www.cablesandconnectors.com

They have on this page http://www.cablesandconnectors.com/PIX/CC-085.pdf item BRK-PS2-2x4 which I believe is the exact part if you dont want to go through the hassle of building a cable yourself. If you feel like building one.. well, they have the parts for that too.

Or you can do it with spare parts if you have them. I just used one of many old keyboards, hacked off the connector, and determined pinouts by testing continuity from the bottom side of an old motherboard and the (now removed) ps2 connector from the keyboard. Then I used a spare USB motherboard -> pci plate (for additional external USB connections on the back of your PC). I lopped the motherboard connector off of that, cleaned up any extraneous wires, and spliced the keyboard wires to the correct usb wires.

Awesome ASCII art pinout below:


    1             NC
     \_ .     ._/
        . . . .
        / | | \
       /  | |  4
      /   | NC
     /    3
    2

              NC
   1__.   .__/
 2__.   |   .__NC

    3__. .__4

Braided bare wire, which is connected to the outer ring on a male PS2 connector, is chassis ground.

NC == no connection

And this is how you turn a perfectly good PS2 keyboard into a perfectly good watchguard-only keyboard :)

geewhz01

Ok I have the cf running fine but am trying to put the full version on a laptop hd via the 44 pin connector. I booted to a cd and installed it to a 30gb laptop drive. I put it in the fb and I can never get anything to come up on the console with the drive installed. Is there any trick to it that I must do to even get anything on the console?

Andy

tehtrk

@geewhz01:

Ok I have the cf running fine but am trying to put the full version on a laptop hd via the 44 pin connector. I booted to a cd and installed it to a 30gb laptop drive. I put it in the fb and I can never get anything to come up on the console with the drive installed. Is there any trick to it that I must do to even get anything on the console?

Andy

I was unable to boot anything but the CF using the IDE connectors until I had my rigged keyboard hooked up. that enabled me to get into the bios or select the boot menu option on boot. Until I could do that, all I got was a boot error on the LCD display and the POST staring at me on the monitor until I rebooted. I suspect that this is where you are at right now.

On a side note, does anyone know why I have to specify black as the color when I post here? If I don't, my posts are invisible white text on preview(maybe on posting, too, I don't know)…

geewhz01

I figured it out, after installing to the hd I had to go into the interface and turn the serial console on. Once I did that i was able to see what was happening and I followed the first post to fix the boot issue.

Sifter

@geewhz01:

Ok I have the cf running fine but am trying to put the full version on a laptop hd via the 44 pin connector. I booted to a cd and installed it to a 30gb laptop drive. I put it in the fb and I can never get anything to come up on the console with the drive installed. Is there any trick to it that I must do to even get anything on the console?

Andy

How are you mounting the harddrive in the case? I sure would like to find the factory made caddy.

geewhz01

@Sifter:

How are you mounting the harddrive in the case? I sure would like to find the factory made caddy.

I took the existing mounting plate out and cut the back piece off, basically to not have to get a longer cable and try to route it. I then drilled 2 holes at the back of the plate and put the drive on/attached with the 2 screws. It's not pretty but was the quickest fix I found at the time. I do wish there was a better caddy for it but just made what I had work. Drive isn't going anywhere and seems to be working just fine so far.

tehtrk

Here's a link to a demanufacturing doc with some good pictures for reference.
http://www.watchguard.com/docs/corporate/wg_coreDe-MFR_instructions.pdf

As for the official hard drive upgrade from Watchguard, I don't think they ever came out with it.

Sifter

I scrapped the whole hard drive idea and installed the full version on a 4gig Hitachi microdrive on the cf slot.

tehtrk

Is that solid state flash or are you talking about one of those tiny hard disks with the moving parts just like a full size HD?

Sifter

@tehtrk:

Is that solid state flash or are you talking about one of those tiny hard disks with the moving parts just like a full size HD?

Identical to this:

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=hitachi+microdrive&oe=utf-8&cid=16930522550160113094&scoring=p#ps-sellers

Sifter

With squid, squidguard, and snort all loaded, Im only using 8% of my storage on the microdrive.

I only have 256meg of memory right now, but a 512 stick is on the way to help with 69% memory usage.

I removed the crypto card, and instead installed a wireless card in the mini-pci slot, then drilled a hole in the back of the x700 to mount my external antenna connector

watchguardx700.PNG_thumb

jmcentire

Hey everyone! It's been a while since I have been on here, I was surprised to see my thread still going.

Anyway I thought I would try out 1.2.3 RC1 on one of my fireboxes, and it looks like the SafeNet card is supported(or at least detected) now:
…
safe0 mem 0xefbfe000-0xefbfffff irq 3 at device 6.0 on pci2
safe0: [ITHREAD]
safe0: SafeNet SafeXcel-1141 rng des/3des aes md5 sha1 null
…
Anyone had any luck making use of it?

Also I noticed a few people asking about hard drive mounting here is what I did: I removed the tray and the ide adapter, plugged a notebook drive into the ide cable and turned the drive a little sideways(so the rear right corner of the drive was touching the tray holder) and lined up the screw hole in the drive with the hole in the tray holder, then put in a screw. It holds it off the board and pretty stable, can't even move the drive with my hand.

hdavy2002

I have three 2 Watchdogs in my network. The latest one like the picture above never worked. Support said it had some bug. Browsing was slow and it was blocking legitimate traffic. I installed pfsense on a dual core dell server and I am rocking now with squid. It does make SENSE to use pfsense.

Once again pfsense dev. THANKS A LOT.

cal_j

@Sifter:

With squid, squidguard, and snort all loaded, Im only using 8% of my storage on the microdrive.

I only have 256meg of memory right now, but a 512 stick is on the way to help with 69% memory usage.

I removed the crypto card, and instead installed a wireless card in the mini-pci slot, then drilled a hole in the back of the x700 to mount my external antenna connector

So the old pc133 stick of 512 ram I have laying around will work in this?

gsiener

Hi all. Just ordered an x700 and am eager to jump into things. I'd prefer to run this off a cf card vs. a hard drive, but can't tell from the previous posts if you can run pfsense off a cf card alone?

How big is the advantage of using a microdrive vs. a standard cf card (or rather, one of the speedier cf cards)?

wallabybob

I've been using a 1GB Solid State Disk Module (see http://www.memoryc.com/transcend/ts1gdom40v-s.html and http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/ItemDetail.asp?ItemID=TS1GDOM40V-S) for my pfSense system for about 14 months now.

Some microdrives have been made to work with pfSense, others have been problematical. The disk module I used was cheaper than any microdrive I was able to find at the time.

gsiener

Sorry, just one more clarification:

Is anyone able to run pfsense off a cf card that's connected via Watchguard's standard cf interface (e.g., nothing attached via IDE)?