Successful Install on Watchguard Firebox X700!

theborger

Just picked one of these up for cheap. Does anyone have a junk one that would be willing to sale me the drive bay cover?

Thanks

stephenw10

Where abouts are you?

Steve

theborger

Tampa Florida. Ill pay shipping plus what ever u want for the item.

thanks

stephenw10

I don't actually have a spare one myself and I'm in the UK anyway but perhaps someone closer can help you out.

Steve

theborger

So firebox arrived, And i got pfsense on it. But if i do a hard power off, and then try to power back on, i get nothing on console. It even had an ipaddress on the Lan side, and i was able to access. But after the hard power off, i get no ipaddress.

Anyone seen this before?

Thanks

stephenw10

The serial console problem has been seen by several users see this thread:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,34814.15.html
It is not yet well understood but the workaround seems to be effective.

Not sure about the LAN not coming up. Did you set a static IP?

Steve

theborger

this does not seam to be my problem, I get a full boot one time, and then if i turn it off it will not boot the next time. if i wait 5 mins with the power off system will boot up fine. I tried an image of monowall and it did not do this. So i am not sure if it is the cf cards i am using, but that seams to be the only difference.

stephenw10

Hmm. So does it reboot if you issue a reboot command from the GUI, without physically de-powering it?

Have you checked the CMOS battery? If it's flat it can cause the bios to not boot on each initial power up.
Different sized CF cards? UDMA capable CF cards can cause a problem, you have to disable UDMA either in pfSense (usually is by default) or the bios.

Steve

theborger

if i reboot it from the web page or from the console it powers down, but will not come back up until i wait 5 min or so.

Ill check the cmos battery this evening. It came with a 32mb card i think. and i am using a 4gb card the card is the first thing i thought of and ill have to order one.

stephenw10

If it doesn't do it with a monowall image then I doubt it's a problem with the card.
Does it show anything on the console when you reboot?

Steve

theborger

i have not tried monowall on the 4gb cf, i am about to do that. And no nothing on the console at all.

theborger

so just tried the 4gb cf i have with monowall 1.33 and it is booting every single time. I have hard powered it off 5 times back to back and it works fine. So i guess the cf card is ok.

arstacey

I wanted to see if anyone else has had these same issues on their watchguard/pfsense box. I flashed the embedded 2G image to a 2GB CF card and so far everything seems to be working fine, including the LCD, on my X1000. However I have the following issues:

1. I used the serial band-aid trick posted here, http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,34814.15.html, to try and get the serial console to work beyond boot. I get serial output until I see the message Bootup complete, then I get /etc/rc: /usr/local/share/misc/serialbandaid.sh: Permission denied. I thought that it might be a permissions issue, so I tried to chmod +x and even chmod 777 the file but just get an error that says Read-only file system. Has anyone else come across this?

2. Has anyone tried upgrading the ram? Mine had 256MB of PC133. I tried to put in two different 512MB sticks of different brand but identical speed and timing ram and the system will not boot. I get the first beep after a few seconds when I power on but the system seems to hang. Don't know why or where because I get no serial output when this happens. Just wondering if anyone has had any luck doing this.

stephenw10

The file system is supposed to be mounted read only for the nanoBSD image.
However there is currently a bug that means it sometimes isn't. See: http://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/1279
It appears some progress has been made on this and it's related to package installation. I guess you haven't installed any packages?

The correct way to modify files in nanobsd is to first remount the filesystem see:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Remount_embedded_filesystem_as_read-write

The X-core seems to be picky about it's memory. Reading back through this thread (now TL/DR!) there are a number of posts about ram not working.
Unless you're running memory hungry packages you won't need more than 256MB.

Steve

woc38

@arstacey:

[…]
then I get /etc/rc: /usr/local/share/misc/serialbandaid.sh: Permission denied. I thought that it might be a permissions issue, so I tried to chmod +x and even chmod 777 the file but just get an error that says Read-only file system. Has anyone else come across this?

Had this issue on a 2.0 release installation (full install on hard disk). I did a chmod 755 ont the serialbandaid.sh file, and now it's working. I have no problem with the read-only file system because of the HD install, but 755 is enough (probably 555 should also do it)

batteryman

My bios was reset and now I cant get it to boot from a CF card or even see it for that matter. Anybody know what I need to change in bios? I have a PS2 KB connected…

stephenw10

Do you have a pci graphics card and monitor attached too?
How was the bios reset? Is it corrupt?

Steve

batteryman

@stephenw10:

Do you have a pci graphics card and monitor attached too?
How was the bios reset? Is it corrupt?

Steve

Hi Steve

Yes i have a really old pci video card installed. barely fits..

Bios is fine the battery just went dead so i replaced it.

i have it set to boot from other devices and still nothing.

stephenw10

If the battery went flat it may have a corrupt CMOS (forgotten some settings only).
It should boot from the CF with the default settings.
Try resetting the CMOS and loading the default values from the BIOS.

Is this the same CF card that was booting fine previously? What size is it?

Steve

PowerToTheUsers

Hey,

a few months ago I bought a x700 which already had pfSense 1.2.3 on it, and I love it. But now I wanted to try it for myself: I found another x700, and an x550e, got myself a couple of 4GB CF-cards and I've seen pfSense 2.0 is out as well. So I was ready for some pfSense-fun and -experimenting. I started, but I was stopped quite soon after that:

I put the CF in a computer with a CF-card reader, and I used physdiskwrite (as described here, but with PhysGUI as described here) to write pfSense-1.2.3-RELEASE-4g-nanobsd.img.gz on it. I put the CF-card in my X700, connected with a serial cable, opened putty and saw it booting. Or at least trying to, as this was the output:

1 FreeBSD
2 FreeBSD

Boot: 1
/boot.config: -h
No /boot/loader

FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
boot:
No /boot/kernel/kernel

FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
boot:

All this output is without any input from me through putty. As I read in the startpost of this thread, I entered ufs:ad2s1a, but that doesn't bring it any further:

1 FreeBSD
2 FreeBSD

Boot: 1
/boot.config: -h
No /boot/loader

FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
boot:
No /boot/kernel/kernel

FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
boot: ufs:ad2s1a No ufs:ad2s1a

FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)ufs:ad2s1a
boot:

When I try with the CF-card with pfSense 2.0 on it, I get a similar output:

1 pfSense
2 pfSense

F6 PXE
Boot: 1
/boot.config: -h
No /boot/loader

FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
boot:
No /boot/kernel/kernel

FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
boot:

As it suggest both FreeBSD-options, I assume the Firebox is trying to boot from the CF-card, so the card should be OK.

Can anyone give me a little push to get over this obstacle?

Thanks in advance!