NanoBSD version installs are not flexible enough…
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@cmb:
There's nothing antiquated about serial consoles
It could just be me that's antiquated! :(
It never fails to amaze me that some people have actually stopped using email entirely in favour of facebook. Those same people probably don't use serial that often. :PIs there some big problem to having both serial and CGA console? Perhaps a boot time parameter could be used to switch consoles?
Steve
Edit: Ironic typo left in for effect. :D
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RS-232 ports are getting a bit harder to find these days. I kept an old laptop with a built-in COM port around for years, but finally gave up when its battery became useless and I couldn't read the screen very well due to CCFL aging.
It does seem like some sort of compromise between a full install and the existing Embedded build would be useful. Maybe a full-featured build based on NanoBSD would work.
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@cmb:
There's nothing antiquated about serial consoles
It could just be me that's antiquated! :(
It never fails to amaze me that some people have actually stopped using email entirely in favour of facebook. Those same people probably don't use serial that often. :PIs there some big problem to having both serial and CGA console? Perhaps a boot time parameter could be used to switch consoles?
Steve
Edit: Ironic typo left in for effect. :D
LOL! Wait I check my facebook via 300 baud serial modem don't you? :D
But I got the biggest chuckle over CGA. Compressed Gas Association? LMAO! Not sure if that was intentional (since CGA is long long LONG extinct except apparently in some IT departments who still use serial daily cuz Cisco says so) but it had been so long since I even seen CGA written out it took me a minute to register what it was. Now that is sad on my part & shows those brain cells have undergone garbage collection long ago. hehe
Anyway all in good fun. No offense to anyone.
Bill -
Did we ever get to the underlying question? Does pfSense work on this box? Was any attempt made? Or does the lack of a VGA, DVI, DisplayPort, or HDMI connector disqualify the box as "not modern" or "not home friendly"?
4GB of RAM, Intel ethernet, Atom D510 (dual core). If this box performs the way the specifications suggest, and the price is reasonable, I would say this is an ALIX killer for sure.
Forgive me, but since pfSense is a group effort, is it reasonable to ask what the output was on the serial console at boot time?
EDIT: Found this post: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,27780.msg144750.html#msg144750
All kinds of serial goodness in there ;D
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Did we ever get to the underlying question? Does pfSense work on this box? Was any attempt made? Or does the lack of a VGA, DVI, DisplayPort, or HDMI connector disqualify the box as "not modern" or "not home friendly"?
4GB of RAM, Intel ethernet, Atom D510 (dual core). If this box performs the way the specifications suggest, and the price is reasonable, I would say this is an ALIX killer for sure.
Forgive me, but since pfSense is a group effort, is it reasonable to ask what the output was on the serial console at boot time?
If it helps I built new pfsense box last week with:
JetWay JNC92-330-LF Mini ITX Motherboard & Intel Atom 330 CPU (Onboard Realtek RTL8111C gigabit)
Jetway 3x Intel Gigabit LAN Module AD3INLANG (82541PI x 3)
512MB DDR2
4GB Kingston CF card with CF->IDE adapter
120W PSU in mini itx caseUsing USB CF reader I put put on pfSense-2.0-RC1-2g-i386-20110226-1633-nanobsd.img
I had to turn off DMA & UDMA in bios & force LBA mode to get it to boot.
I attached DB9-DB9 null modem cable to lappy & opened hyperterminal set to 9600,N,8,1
Once it started to boot it looked like it wasn't working because there was just a blinking cursor in upper left of VGA screen but eventually 1 line of text appears.
In hyperterminal it was ready immediately, asking me to choose partition 1 or 2 & the delay was that waiting.
You can watch it detect hardware & it does indeed detect all 4 NIC's.
Eventually it gets to screen asking if I wanted to setup VLAN's & then the normal wizard for setting up LAN/WAN/OPTx interfaces
Once i assigned LAN & setup a different private IP range I did the rest of the setup on via the web interface.So far it works great. I have 3 wans & 1 lan and playing with load balancing & failover. It shows 18% mem use, 16% space used & CPU stays at 0 unless I enable all 3 traffic graphs then it spikes to 6-8%. (From looks of top output php is the culprit but not sure why it'd use so much with 10 second updates. I don't recall the full install version doing that on the 3Ghz P4 Dell I had tested.) The only real issue I had were bugs in the code causing headaches setting up PPPoE, a different bug causing system to no longer boot when I chose wrong interface on PPPoE and for some reason browsing internet has big delays when I have multiwan group set as default vs WAN (even when I have WAN as tier 1 & others as tier 2) so I still need to figure that out.
Anyway this setup is definitely an ALIX killer even with the lowly 512 stick! 1.6Ghz Dual core with hyperthreading Atom is actually very snappy & I doubt I'll be able to load it down. Btw it measures 42W. Most of that is the old crap chipset used on that motherboard but I couldn't justify $80 more for the updated one to save 18W of power. (I paid $99 for the mb & $77 for the 3 port nic daughterboard. I had the rest of the parts on hand already so killer router for $176 which was almost $20 less than what I was quoted for a shipped ALIX.2D13 & that only had 256M & 3 NIC's & what I gather a much slower processor :D )
Anyway sorry not the same system but similar enough hopefully that was useful.
Bill -
Thanks
Lots of us are looking for a fanless, embedded, low power solution with GigE and enough processing horsepower to sustain 100s of Mb/sec over the Ethernet ports. I can't find a price or a source for the Lanner box(es) anywhere. But it's a good sign that we're starting to see these :)
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gloomrider,
From what I could tell all of the Jetway Atom boards are fanless except the 330 & I believe it is the CHIPSET that has a fan not the CPU itself. The Jetway has the daughtboard sockets where you plug in board, 3 of which are 3 port NIC options: Intel gigabit, realtek gigabit & realtek 100mbit. I opted for the intel one even though it was $30 more than the realtek because it supposedly performs better & has better driver support & so far both appear to be be true based on my testing.So if you went for the D510 or D525 or based board it should be like 8-10W less & have about the same power as the 330 yet no fans. Or the N270 was like 18W less but 1/2 the processing speed too (based on cpubenchmark.net values). I'm content with 42W (measure at plug with kill-a-watt meter) & the essentially silent fan that is on the board I chose. :)
Bill -
The N550 board will use even less power as it supports speedstep and the desktop Atom CPUs don't.
Steve
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Just to clarify: the Lanner has a serial port, but I have nothing that I can hook up as a terminal to it.
Also: the Lanner with the CF card will happily run the full version, however
a) in a device located on the other side of the continent I don't want to risk wearing out the CF cards memory cells and then have to do an emergency plane trip to service the unit
b) I would like to have the backup slice, such that if an OS upgrade gets screwed up, or anything like that, I have something to fall back on without expensive plane trip to service the unit.
I have a second Lanner box, on which I have already the full version of pfSense installed. Locally I don't mind the full version, because CF cards are cheap, and should it ever wear out, I just re-install from scratch, load a configuration backup, and am done with it.
Also, since I want to run freeSwitch locally, I have to use the full version here anyway.The issue thus is not if the Lanner can run the full or embedded version; it should be able to run either just fine.
The issue is, how do I get this thing configured.If nanoBSD-pfSense wouldn't BLINDLY turn off VGA and keyboard support, but would test if the drivers load, then I could configure it with screen and keyboard attached, instead of using a serial console.
If nanoBSD-pfSense would enable DHCP on the first NIC found, regardless of the driver used, then that should work, too. Right now, from what I gather, it only does that with certain types of hardware it's familiar with, and for everything else you have to do initial setup over a serial console, and that's the stumbling block.I'll try to edit the config file directly somehow, by mounting the CF card on the other pfSense box with a USB card reader, but few people will have a second pfSense box handy for that.
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A standard FreeBSD in a virtualbox is sufficient.
You can use this guide:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Modifying_Embedded -
Just to clarify: the Lanner has a serial port, but I have nothing that I can hook up as a terminal to it.
Also: the Lanner with the CF card will happily run the full version, however
a) in a device located on the other side of the continent I don't want to risk wearing out the CF cards memory cells and then have to do an emergency plane trip to service the unit
b) I would like to have the backup slice, such that if an OS upgrade gets screwed up, or anything like that, I have something to fall back on without expensive plane trip to service the unit.
I have a second Lanner box, on which I have already the full version of pfSense installed. Locally I don't mind the full version, because CF cards are cheap, and should it ever wear out, I just re-install from scratch, load a configuration backup, and am done with it.
Also, since I want to run freeSwitch locally, I have to use the full version here anyway.The issue thus is not if the Lanner can run the full or embedded version; it should be able to run either just fine.
The issue is, how do I get this thing configured.If nanoBSD-pfSense wouldn't BLINDLY turn off VGA and keyboard support, but would test if the drivers load, then I could configure it with screen and keyboard attached, instead of using a serial console.
If nanoBSD-pfSense would enable DHCP on the first NIC found, regardless of the driver used, then that should work, too. Right now, from what I gather, it only does that with certain types of hardware it's familiar with, and for everything else you have to do initial setup over a serial console, and that's the stumbling block.I'll try to edit the config file directly somehow, by mounting the CF card on the other pfSense box with a USB card reader, but few people will have a second pfSense box handy for that.
A Prolific USB/serial converter is less that $15US. Serial console is not a "stumbling block". You can install PC-BSD on a laptop (make it dual boot with existing Windows) and you'll be able to mount the CF card right on your laptop.
Being able to see boot time messages when working with beta software is a must, IMHO.
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A Prolific USB/serial converter is less that $15US. Serial console is not a "stumbling block". You can install PC-BSD on a laptop (make it dual boot with existing Windows) and you'll be able to mount the CF card right on your laptop.
Being able to see boot time messages when working with beta software is a must, IMHO.
I'm using a Mac, not a PC :P
Anyway, the point is, if nanoBSD wouldn't BLINDLY turn off console (VGA+keyboard) support in systems that offer video and keyboard support (like the Lanner device I'm using), we wouldn't have that issue.
I have a screen and a keyboard attached to my "embedded" device, with a break-out cable that I can remove when everything is working smoothly.In the age of plug-and-play drivers, it really shouldn't be that hard to see if keyboard and video drivers load successfully and to ONLY DISABLE VIDEO AND KEYBOARD IF THESE DRIVERS DO NOT LOAD properly.
That should amount to a few lines of code plus a conditional, yet it would solve a lot of headache.Why is it, that a simple suggestion for improvement meets that much resistance? Aren't we here to try in whatever way we can to make this a better system? Or are we here to defend he status quo and prove that we're "right"?
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In the age of plug-and-play drivers, it really shouldn't be that hard to see if keyboard and video drivers load successfully and to ONLY DISABLE VIDEO AND KEYBOARD IF THESE DRIVERS DO NOT LOAD properly.
That should amount to a few lines of code plus a conditional, yet it would solve a lot of headache.I'm not familiar with a wide variety of embedded devices. With graphics so commonly included in chipsets and serial interfaces having such a long history of use, it possible there are some "embedded" devices with graphics hardware unconnected and using a serial port as the console. Its not clear to me that your suggestion would be a good thing to do for such hardware.
Why is it, that a simple suggestion for improvement meets that much resistance? Aren't we here to try in whatever way we can to make this a better system? Or are we here to defend he status quo and prove that we're "right"?
Its quite easy to turn this around and ask why such a simple suggestion (spend about US$15 on a USB to serial adapter) meets such resistance.
I think a variant of Murphy's Law is Everything takes longer than you first thought it would. Your suggestion might not be as easy to implement as you first thought and might have significant consequences for systems other than yours. I have worked on a number of "embedded" systems though I don't currently have any that I could even contemplate running pfSense on. Many of those embedded systems have been at least a little bit quirky. That would lead me to be cautious about assuming that the presence of recognisable graphics hardware in a system means there is a connector for a monitor and that the specification of that roles of the pins on that connector can be readily obtained (and that there is a similarly well doumented interface for a keyboard and that the BIOS supports both monitor and keyboard). I understand that implementing your suggestion would be useful to you but it might severely disadvantage a number of other pfSense users. There does come a time when it can be important to say that certain systems need to be "left behind" (e.g. they don't have enough memory, they aren't fast enough, the cost of supporting their quirks is becoming too high, …) but its often not an easy call.
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I'm using a Mac, not a PC :P
We'll, assuming you're running OSX which is BSD based, it should be even easier then! :P
I have to agree with a lot of what you're saying. I was surprised when I first realised that there was no VGA console on Nano. I hadn't realised, however, since I'd never tried to use it, using the serial console was what I expected to do.
Perhaps one of the developers could comment on why this is. I imagine it's simply that whatever boxes they were using for development didn't have VGA. Is there some huge problem with offering both VGA and serial console access?
Steve
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In the age of plug-and-play drivers, it really shouldn't be that hard to see if keyboard and video drivers load successfully and to ONLY DISABLE VIDEO AND KEYBOARD IF THESE DRIVERS DO NOT LOAD properly.
That should amount to a few lines of code plus a conditional, yet it would solve a lot of headache.I'm not familiar with a wide variety of embedded devices. With graphics so commonly included in chipsets and serial interfaces having such a long history of use, it possible there are some "embedded" devices with graphics hardware unconnected and using a serial port as the console. Its not clear to me that your suggestion would be a good thing to do for such hardware.
Assuming it's not possible to run the console on more than one device, isn't there a way to detect if the serial port is connected?
In that case, one could give the serial port priority, provided it's connected, and the graphics/keyboard if there's such hardware and nothing connected to the serial port.
Why is it, that a simple suggestion for improvement meets that much resistance? Aren't we here to try in whatever way we can to make this a better system? Or are we here to defend he status quo and prove that we're "right"?
Its quite easy to turn this around and ask why such a simple suggestion (spend about US$15 on a USB to serial adapter) meets such resistance.
Money and time aside, there is already an abundance of electronic trash and wasted resources.
The promise of software is to replace dedicated hardware with flexible code, so whenever that's a possibility, it's clearly the preferable route from a resource allocation and environmental POV.Ronald
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A Prolific USB/serial converter is less that $15US. Serial console is not a "stumbling block". You can install PC-BSD on a laptop (make it dual boot with existing Windows) and you'll be able to mount the CF card right on your laptop.
Being able to see boot time messages when working with beta software is a must, IMHO.
I'm using a Mac, not a PC :P
Anyway, the point is, if nanoBSD wouldn't BLINDLY turn off console (VGA+keyboard) support in systems that offer video and keyboard support (like the Lanner device I'm using), we wouldn't have that issue.
I have a screen and a keyboard attached to my "embedded" device, with a break-out cable that I can remove when everything is working smoothly.In the age of plug-and-play drivers, it really shouldn't be that hard to see if keyboard and video drivers load successfully and to ONLY DISABLE VIDEO AND KEYBOARD IF THESE DRIVERS DO NOT LOAD properly.
That should amount to a few lines of code plus a conditional, yet it would solve a lot of headache.Why is it, that a simple suggestion for improvement meets that much resistance? Aren't we here to try in whatever way we can to make this a better system? Or are we here to defend he status quo and prove that we're "right"?
Perhaps the central issue here is the target user group for pfSense. It's probably much more than the average home user needs. We agree that the average home user wouldn't have a clue about Prolific dongles and terminal emulators. But pfSense is really for the small to medium size enterprise space. As others in this thread have pointed out, serial console ports are common on ethernet switch gear. Usually the serial port is used for initial setup only. Those of us that have to go on site and setup instances of pfSense would hate to have to schlep a monitor, keyboard & mouse into a comm closet.
Regarding UFS access with your mac, you might want to look here: http://osxbook.com/software/unixfs
Keep in mind that FreeBSD is a server OS. Those that deal with server-class operating systems are used to terminal emulation and command-line. It's how we get things done.
If I understand everything that I've read here about the Lanner gear and pfSense, the serial console works and can be used to initially configure pfSense. It's probably not useful to debate the topic, "but this is 2011, serial is so 20th century, why should I have to deal with it?" I'm certain that on-board video is not being disabled just to foist serial communication upon those who dislike it. For lightweight, embedded boxes whose primary purpose is moving packets in and out of ethernet interfaces, on-board video is superfluous and a waste of valuable system resources IMHO.
The issues that you're having with initial configuration can be easily solved with a Prolific serial/USB adapter and free terminal software (look for the program "screen" on your mac. It's CLI, sorry). I suspect the linkage between nanobsd and initial serial setup will be around for some time to come. But I (and no doubt many others) would be curious to know if your setup was successful once you perform the initial setup through serial and CLI.
Good luck!
