PFSense on a Sendio ICE Box
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I have a Sendio ICE Box mark V (it's an anti-spam appliance) and the HDD crashed on it out of warranty, making it a gigantic paper weight right now. Opening it up revealed a SuperMicro PDSMi+ motherboard and 1GB of ECC memory, so I reset the bios (Sendio puts a password on it) and got it to boot so I could see the CPU, it being an Intel C2D E6420. I stuck another HDD on it and PFSense does install, the board has two NICS so no issue there, Sendio basically just sticks a BIOS password on it and also puts a BIOS boot logo on it, so it's not locked down at all.
I have a couple issues hardware related though, maybe people who have worked with these kind of 1U units can help with. It has two fans, one on the PSU, one infront of the case. The Blower fan infront has a SuperMicro PN FAN-0059L, which is a SuperMicro part so the chassis is a SM but I cannot locate the part number (Sendio might have a deal to get it removed) Where is the part number for this chassis? The reason I ask, is the blower fan is extremely loud and is a three pin so not controlable by the board it seems. I cannot remember how loud it was, but I did open the chassis to blow out the wood dust (came from a factory that makes wood furiniture) and not sure if I blew too hard into the fan or not (this thing had a ton of dust in it) but it's extremely loud and was wondering what kind of replacement I can get for it.
The other thing is that Sendio intalled a front piece to the chassis that includes an LCD display with buttons, a CrystalFontz 633 Serial, a CFA633-TMC-KS to be exact. When the box boots up, it always says I.C.E. Box which is fine, but I tried both versions of LCDProc on both i386 and amd64 builds of PFSense and cannot get the display to change. I did install Windows 7 32bit on a different drive and got the Windows utility to change it, so I know it's not locked down.
The box is nice and is a little shy of four years old right now, and would make a great router, just need a replacement blower that isn't as loud as what's in the box, would prefer one that can be controlled by the board.
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The fans in the Firebox X-e are three pin but are controllable via a pwm output on the superio chip.
Check to see if there are any fan speed settings in the bios. Otherwise you can use any three pin fan. there are a wide variety to choose from that are slow and quiet or fast and loud. Or use an inline speed controller.The Crystalfontz 633 should be supported by the lcdproc-dev package. It may be that you an odd connection option. Do you know which serial port it's connected to? What settings have you tried?
Steve
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The fans in the Firebox X-e are three pin but are controllable via a pwm output on the superio chip.
Check to see if there are any fan speed settings in the bios. Otherwise you can use any three pin fan. there are a wide variety to choose from that are slow and quiet or fast and loud. Or use an inline speed controller.The Crystalfontz 633 should be supported by the lcdproc-dev package. It may be that you an odd connection option. Do you know which serial port it's connected to? What settings have you tried?
Steve
I'll have to see what I can get for a fan, I wanted something that would fit that case. It has a bios setting, but it does not get that much more quiet, it uses voltage to change the fan speed when it's 3 pin (the bios lets you choose between 3 and 4 pin, and then each of those has a workstation and server option, no idea what the difference really is, the manual on SM's website didnt' really say what the difference was).
I got the LCD working now via ldcproc-dev, I had to use the Com2 alternative and found out the service was stopped so I got it working. I thought the buttons lit up and they won't using the driver but that's ok, the buttons do work regardless. I also am using amd64 build now, got two WD Raptor 150GB's in there in RAID 1 on the HOST RAID Adaptec as I had them lieing around.
Sucks that the box was out of warranty and the HDD crashed, nothing else is wrong with it but Sendio did not want anything to do with it. They're about $3000 too (software included in that price). I will probably also pick up the PCI Express Riser card since it's cheap just in case I want to slot something in. I didnt' see anything for the PCI slot on SM's website so not sure how I'm suppoed to use it. I cannot remember, do 32bit PCI cards work in the PCI-X slot? There's a Riser card for that slot too.
Edit: Oops, forgot to mention that CF633 seems to have FAN headers on it too, will have to look into it's fan controlling capabilities.
