Watchguard V60L pfsense Instalation issues
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Hi Steve , i can not understand why it says parallel port ?!!
Why it says parallel port if the hardware have none ?
can that port be related to the db9 ups port at back of the hardware ?
I will check your topic about the leds later , i have to go to work now . -
The UPS connector is almost certainly a serial port.
Just because there isn't a parallel port connector on the box does not mean it doesn't have one. It's standard PC hardware it probably uses a SuperIO chip to provide various services and it may provide a parallel port even if it's not connected to anything. Purely speculation but I could imagine an incorrectly terminated parallel interface generating way too many interrupts. On the later fireboxes the parallel port is used for the LCD.
Try looking in the BIOS, if you can, see if it can be disabled.Steve
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how do i go to the bios settings on this firewall ?
i only have the console as an interface to communicate with the hardware !!!! -
Well I wasn't sure if you could. Many appliance style boxes use console-redirect to access the BIOS via the serial port. Often you have to press TAB to enter the setup. Otherwise we could try switching the serial port mode using a tunable.
Edit: Try adding the line:
hint.ppc.0.flags="0x24"to the file /boot/loader.conf.local. You will have to create that file.
That line should disable the parallel port using an IRQ and force it to use EPP mode.Steve
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Bingo , worked just fine , thanks
no more irq issues .
Tab does not work to get access to bios , you told about tuneable settings that i may can get access to it , how do i do it ?Thanks for everything
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Ah sorry I wrote serial and meant parallel. That device hint is the sort of thing I was thinking of. There's probably no easy way of accessing the BIOS if console redirect isn't enabled. We had to do it on the firebox x-e box because you need BIOS access to boot pfSense on that. It was high risk initially though.
Steve
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Hi,
@pedropt: You can access the BIOS by hitting CTRL + C (I use Putty) in the console when you see the memory test
Because it looks like there is no way to bring this 4 port NIC to work i wanted to replace it but non of the NICs i tried
is recognized. did somebody tried this before and had success with it?Thanks in advance for any answer or idea
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thanks for the tip Canus Lupus , i did not knew that one .
my issue now is working in the bios from putty .
i have try many commands to navigate on the bios , but i had no success doing it , i believe that half of my keyboard keys on bios just give it an exit code and then run the boot .
About getting the other 4 nics working i did not yet managed to get them working .
I can only get those nics working using the original watchguard firmware .
Other thing before i leave , i posted a cable connection schematic on this thread for this firewall , i later notice that using a Cisco console cable it will work perfectly too .
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Hi pedropt,
yes this exactly what i am using. One of my CISCO cables :-)
yes the original 4 port NIC which is inside i get also only working with the original SW and i gave up to get it
to work with another SW. I try to use then some other NICs inside but i run always in some problems. It looks like
best is working NICs with an Intel chip set (like the 2 on board ports). I only run in to an IRQ problem with an 2 port
Intel based NIC which i actually wanted to use.About the navigation in the BIOS. Yes when you press a wrong button kicks you out of the BIOS. Unfortunately i
am right now not at home but later on when i will be back i will have a look on my notices and will post here an
description how to navigate in this BIOS :-) -
In the x-peak box the console redirect in the bios is pretty buggy. I was able get around that by connecting a keyboard to use for input while using the serial port to see the output. I don't see a keyboard header on the board though.
Steve
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i can only get the HTA ports on the motherboard working , right now i am using both for wan and lan .
i am curious to know if there is a way to know how watchguard put those 4 nics working in V60L .
tomorrow i will put my original card from watchguard on a card reader , and i will look the files using my linux .
maybe i can copy the uncompressed files to a rar file to someone here with experience look into them .
I think i can also convert the files in ntfs file system for those that are using Windows OS ?
Shall i give the trouble doing that ?
it will give us some kind of advantage to understand how firmware puts the 4 nics working ?
let me know .
Best of all . -
The extra 4 NICs are more like a layer 3 switch than a quad NIC card. As such it will be veery difficult to control them from pfSense. It might theoretically be possible if you were able to determine how Watchguard's OS talks to the card but it would be hard.
The card appears as a networking device in pciconf and that initially makes you think it's a network card of some sort that might be recognisable by a standard FreeBSD driver given the correct PCI IDs however there isn't a NIC chip on the card that we might reasonably talk to. If we were able to talk to the card how is the Rapidstream chip controlled? If we're very lucky it might be via telnet or some simple protocol but it might just as likely be directly via the PCI slot using completely proprietary coding.
Looking in the Watchguard firmware might reveal some clues but it's likely all the stuff to talk to the card will be binary blobs.Steve
