PfSense with Axiomtek NA341 Board

[kejianshi]

Yeah - Its a matter of more than spec.  One of my biggest gripes with all things Intel is they rape the public.  You could call it a function of capitalism but its still gouging.  They for sure make the best stuff, but its not sooooooooooo much better to justify their prices.  They are simply too proud of their stuff.  Price per performance definitely goes to AMD big time even with Intel's tech lead.  However, if you are made of money, Intel is the obvious choice.

[valnar]

Even in single threaded mode, any Atom will perform an order of magnitude faster than a Geode LX800 processor.  While there is no Passmark score for the older Geode, reports of people on this forum and elsewhere show about 3x improvement in raw throughput..  For those of us where the ALIX board was just on the edge of being useless, that's a nice bump with some extra overhead.

If they can get the (total) power consumption down to under 10 watts, that'll be worth it.  If it has the same 25-30 watt consumption of regular Atom boards, it'll be a non-starter as it might require active cooling.

[jasonlitka]

Well, then it will be less than I said.  Soekris is expensive but he fills a niche…  If there's more competition in that area then prices will drop.

[kejianshi]

Does the Atom have the new cryptogryphy routines built into the CPU like the new AMDs and Some Intel chips? 
I Don't see it in my list…  AES-NI

Geode supports AES hardware acceleration.  How does it compare to a new Atom while crunching AES without the aid of add-on crypt boards?

(I'm sure the Atom is a generally better platformer, just asking this one use.  It would have been great to get AES-NI on Atom)

[stephenw10]

The Atom will likely be good for ~50Mbps of OpenVPN (AES128). The Alix does ~20Mbps IPSec (AES128). Not directly comparable but gives you an idea.

Steve

[kejianshi]

Yeah - Thats a tad bit better.

[ovi_diu]

Hi,
I bought this board and I followed the tutorial for embedded computers. I wrote the .img with physdiskwrite but after boot nothing else appear using the console. Using vga I see only colored chars. Any advice will be great, thanks

[stephenw10]

Exactly which image did you write?

Is the VGA connector internal? Did it come with a header cable?

Do you see the see the bios output on either the serial console or vga?

Steve

[ovi_diu]

I have a 4 GB CF Card

I tried both pfSense-memstick-2.1-RELEASE-i386.img  and    pfSense-memstick-serial-2.1-RELEASE-i386.img

I connected the monitor using vga cable ( the board comes with integrated VGA connector )

I also set same settings ( bts / seconnd ) in bios, serial port adapter and client. I see how appliance boots, I can navigate on bios and that's all

Thank you

[doktornotor]

For CF, you should use nanobsd (or nanobsd_vga), not memstick.

[ovi_diu]

sorry, I was in a hurry
pfSense-2.1.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img
pfSense-2.1.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd_vga.img

I followed this tutorial too : https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/HOWTO_Install_pfSense
I replaced config file ( .xml ) but nothing, same results

[stephenw10]

Hmm, I'm missing something. You were able to replace the config.xml file? How did you do that? The box had booted pfSense or you mounted the card in a BSD machine?
If you are getting to the end of the POST messages from the BIOS and then you see nothing from either image on either the VGA or console port then the most likely cause is that the images are not writing to the card correctly. Do you see any errors when writing the image? You could try using the 2GB images instead to ensure they are fitting on the card.

Steve

[ovi_diu]

Shows me the boot menu F1, F2, and then the message:  "/".

Should be fine if I follow the documentation -
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Installing_pfSense
"If everything is configured correctly you should see the kernel beginning to load. At systems with VGA the output will stop displaying a "/" at the screen. From that point on all output is at COM1. Please check the bootup process there by using a null modemcable and a terminal program."

This is the last message I have seen on both monitor and serial ( HyperTerminal, Putty )

On writeing the img to CF i had no error messages

[stephenw10]

Ok. Have you ever seen anything on the serial console? Have you proved the connection on some other hardware? Like it says in the doc the standard Nano image switches it's console output to the serial port at that point so your serial terminal setup not working correctly matches those symptoms. That doesn't explain the nano+vga images though.

You are seeing the FreeBSD bootloader though so it looks at though the images are writing to the card correctly and the bios is correctly booting it though so that's good.  ;)

Steve

[stephenw10]

Since it's hanging at the 'spinner' you could try these HD mode suggestions:
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Boot_Troubleshooting#BIOS.2FDisk_Errors

Steve

[ovi_diu]

Not helped :(
I tried with the 2Gb img and same results
Is any way to start instalation from a bootable usb ? I tried with usb stick and usb dvd but won't boot, hiren's cd also boots
Please give me other suggests, thank you

[stephenw10]

If it will boot from USB then you can write the Nano images straight to the USB stick and boot from that.
To boot anything via USB you probably have to interrupt the boot loader and set a delay. See:
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Boot_Troubleshooting#Booting_from_USB

Surprised it wouldn't boot from CF though.  :-\ As a test you could try booting an alternative image from the CF. For example you could use this FreeDOS image:
https://sites.google.com/site/pfsensefirebox/home/FreeDOSBios2.img.gz
That boots to a console at 9600bps on com1.

Steve

[ovi_diu]

I tried with FreeDOS, is booting even if it stops asking me for mouse, at COM1, but this is another work :)
what I do with pfSense ?
I tried to boot over the SATA port with a DVD RW, loader stop on console at:
CD Loader 1.2

Building the boot loader arguments
Looking up /BOOT/LOADER… Found
Relocating the loader and the BTX
Starting the BTX loader
_

[stephenw10]

Was that via VGA or serial?
That's odd. It boots the FreeDOS image fine but hangs booting pfSense.  :-\ Hmm, must be something it doesn't like about the disk controller or some other piece of hardware. Nothing on that board looks too exotic though and you tried the various HD modes in the BIOS?.

Steve

[ovi_diu]

I tried FreeBSD 9.1  amd64, i386, memstick  and  FreeBSD 10 too

On Monitor ( via vga )

On Terminal ( via serial console )

With pfSense Embeded 4GB ( or 2GB ) CF VGA or Serial img:

Monitor: same as FreeBSD

Terminal:

No any good results with IDE or AHCI setting in BIOS

Also I tried installing Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit, everything worked OK