Barracuda 310 NICs

stephenw10 · Feb 7, 2015, 5:36 PM

Never heard back from Maxpol, maybe my code set fire to his box. ;)

Steve

gac · Feb 16, 2015, 7:27 PM

Your code is good, I've basically done exactly the same thing on my own 310 - annoyingly, I was probably working it out myself around the time this thread was happening, I never thought to look on here, despite knowing you (stephen) as a helpful guy from my previous experimentation with a Lanner unit. The Barracuda came up for £1 on eBay about 5 minutes from home, so I figured it was worth a try.

cron410, where are you located? If you're in the US then you're probably out of luck, but if you're located in the UK then I could look into disconnecting my watchdog circuit from my 310 - it's an older revision than the one pictured here (pretty sure mine uses a PATA disk, from memory) but given that Barracuda have written the firmware to apply to all hardware revisions I would imagine that the behaviour is identical to this unit. I'm certainly 99% sure I've used the same values as maxpol did to activate my front ports and de-activate the LEDs (red disappears after bootloader, yellow disappears after fully booted, leaving only the green as a "everything's OK" indicator).

I intend to get pfSense working and pop it back on eBay as a fully-featured average-spec firewall rather than just a web filter but given that I don't really have time to write anything in the UI specifically for toggling the front ports on and off from the web interface, I don't 100% need the NIC module at this point in time.

22213w · Jun 6, 2015, 3:38 PM

@stephenw10

I need your help. I am a victim of purchasing a barracuda 310 and the front NIC's are now working. I followed you procedure and I am getting a funny number back.

I did this : ./readio 0x378

And I am getting back: Reading 378 :0

I changed the parallel port in bios to a different number and ran ./readio and I keep getting back xxx:0

Now I'm not good with numbers but I know 0 means nothing. So I did ./writeio 0x378 0x0 and nothing happen.

Please I hope you get this message or anyone that can help me. I just purchased this off ebay and its a shame I may have to junk it.

Many Thanks!

22213w · Jun 6, 2015, 4:53 PM

I got it to work read on in the topic. I issue this command ./writeio 0x378 0x08 the LAN/WAN ports started to work .

But when I rebooted the box I had to fetch and redo the instructions. The lan ports are dead again after reboot.

What should I do?

Thanks

22213w · Jun 6, 2015, 5:21 PM

Sorry I figured that out I just loaded Shell pkg and added the command in it and rebooted and it works. All is well.

Thanks much!

stephenw10 · Jun 6, 2015, 6:20 PM

So all good then? Glad you got it working. :)

You should be able to use the BCHW program rather than using writeIO to set the bits directly.

Steve

22213w · Jun 7, 2015, 9:35 PM

Once again Stephenw10 you are the man. I didn't see the post for BCHW. I just set it on the barracuda 310 and it works like a charm.

Thanks for letting me know and getting back to me so fast.

Many tanks!

muddy9069 · Nov 18, 2015, 5:13 PM

Steven,

Sorry I know this is an old post but your the only person I can find that seems to have figured out the barracuda nic issue. Your programs work great for pfSense but I am trying to use them in Debian and apparently they are not compatible.. Is this something you could possibly recompile for debian/ubuntu?

Or point me in the direction of a comparable program to do the same?? I know nothing of programming or I would attempt to do it myself..

Thanks

stephenw10 · Nov 24, 2015, 11:42 AM

Hi, sorry for the delay.
The source code for BCHW is listed above, you can probably try just compiling it in Debian. It's all pretty basic C libraries etc.
Alternatively the entire thing only sets bits on the parallel port for which there are many programs available. I'd be very surprised if there wasn't already code to do it, possibly even already on your box.

Steve

jmccaf77 · Dec 3, 2015, 12:04 AM

Thank you everybody! Especially Stephenw10…
I got pretty much everything I needed from this thread to repurpose a long-out-of-warranty Barracuda Web Filter 410... Only slightly different than the 310 (one PCIe slot controls both NICs instead of 2 PCI slots)... After getting FreeBSD to see the Lib32 libraries, by adding the path with ldconfig, I was able to successfully run ./BCHW32 bypass off, which clicked the relays and activated the front NICs... When it rebooted, the command had to be run again. To remedy this, I put BCHW32 in / , added the following to a file, named BypassOff.sh, and placed the file in /usr/local/etc/rc.d:

cd /
./BCHW32 bypass off
./BCHW32 red off
./BCHW32 yellow off
./BCHW32 green off

Now, when the power is lost, the NICs go to Bypass Mode, and when power is restored and pfsense loads, the script runs and the NICs light up...
Now, we can start configuring, testing, using, the various packages available for use with pfsense...

roccor · Jan 8, 2016, 7:20 PM

<resurrecting_very_old_thread>I, like the last poster, has hard a very hard time finding anyone else online whose re-purposed a 310 for Pf. I have one sitting behind me, it has the watchdog/relay type front nic board.

I don't have Pf loaded as of yet, but I read through most of the thread here and I'm left still wondering.. what are you all doing so that the nics are enabled after a power cycle/loss? It is some sort of Pf/cron jobs addon thing?

Thanks!</resurrecting_very_old_thread>

roccor · Jan 8, 2016, 9:34 PM

Working my way down this thread on my test pf box.. first halting issue: a lack of an ELF interpreter.

ELF interpreter /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 not found

Except that file does exist in libexec.

-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 267288 Dec 21 16:16 ld-elf.so.1

I've googled and found this: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/4670

Which was utterly useless as my pkg was a 64-bit file. I did try moving it so running pkg would prompt me to reinstall but just like that guy.. 'its already installed'

Anyone know how I can make my ld-elf.so.1 file work or get another?

stephenw10 · Jan 30, 2016, 8:08 PM

Sorry for the (extremely) late reply here.
Did you see that error after trying to run the program? The compiled version is 32bit, what pfSense version are you running?

Steve

thcassio · Mar 29, 2016, 2:31 PM

Hi guys, nice piece of software there, but I just made a jumper on the parallel port wiring that activates / deactivates the the 2 frontal ports, no software interaction is needed and now they stay active all the time. I can post pictures if anyone is interested in doing so, it's really easy.

I really don't care for the lights so all is fine now, pfSense running with 80MBPS throughput on Barracuda 410 Web Filter (Sempron 3200 + 1Gb RAM)

I also replaced the HDD disk with a diskonchip IDE module, so I disabled that annoying loud fan next to the HDD, which probably saves a lot of energy and ear capillaries…

I was wondering if those realtek network cards could be replaced with gigabit low profile cards to allow better throughputs, this device has odd ethernet cables wiring running inside it coming from the rear of those cards..

w3bghost · Apr 10, 2016, 2:26 PM

@thcassio:

Hi guys, nice piece of software there, but I just made a jumper on the parallel port wiring that activates / deactivates the the 2 frontal ports, no software interaction is needed and now they stay active all the time. I can post pictures if anyone is interested in doing so, it's really easy.

I really don't care for the lights so all is fine now, pfSense running with 80MBPS throughput on Barracuda 410 Web Filter (Sempron 3200 + 1Gb RAM)

I also replaced the HDD disk with a diskonchip IDE module, so I disabled that annoying loud fan next to the HDD, which probably saves a lot of energy and ear capillaries…

I was wondering if those realtek network cards could be replaced with gigabit low profile cards to allow better throughputs, this device has odd ethernet cables wiring running inside it coming from the rear of those cards..

I would like to know. I am repurposing a 410 web filter also with pfsense.

thcassio · Apr 12, 2016, 3:02 PM

@w3bghost:

@thcassio:

Hi guys, nice piece of software there, but I just made a jumper on the parallel port wiring that activates / deactivates the the 2 frontal ports, no software interaction is needed and now they stay active all the time. I can post pictures if anyone is interested in doing so, it's really easy.

I really don't care for the lights so all is fine now, pfSense running with 80MBPS throughput on Barracuda 410 Web Filter (Sempron 3200 + 1Gb RAM)

I also replaced the HDD disk with a diskonchip IDE module, so I disabled that annoying loud fan next to the HDD, which probably saves a lot of energy and ear capillaries…

I was wondering if those realtek network cards could be replaced with gigabit low profile cards to allow better throughputs, this device has odd ethernet cables wiring running inside it coming from the rear of those cards..

I would like to know. I am repurposing a 410 web filter also with pfsense.

It's the two wires that comes out from the parallel port and connects to the frontal network daughterboard, just remove the connector and place a jumper where they go connected to.

Please give it a try, leave me a message if you can't find it and I'll open up the server and take some pictures.

Regards

Cassio

firefox · Aug 26, 2016, 1:01 PM

i have the same problem
the front connections do not respond

It's the two wires that comes out from the parallel port and connects to the frontal network daughterboard, just remove the connector and place a jumper where they go connected to.

Please give it a try, leave me a message if you can't find it and I'll open up the server and take some pictures.

is it the two wires color Yellow and green ?

Just unplug them and put a jumper instead ?

stephenw10 · Nov 14, 2016, 11:46 AM

Very late reply here again. :-[

That looks to be wired identically to the first box we looked at. The BCHW program should work on that. If not it will be possible to probe the registers as we did originally.

The program may need re-compiling for 64bit but you can test a 32bit install to confirm it.

Steve

tsquareweb72 · Apr 2, 2018, 9:25 PM

I know this is an old post, but I am trying to get a Barracuda Webfilter 210 to work as a pfsense 2.4.3 64 bit.
I found writeio64 and readio64, which works for the lights (0x88, 0x48, 0x28), but the Nics don't turn on using 0x08.

I tried the BCHW32, but get "ELF interpreter /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 not found". I assume because I'm 64 bit and this is 32 bit.

stephenw10 · Apr 2, 2018, 10:44 PM

Does it look the same internally? Wired to the parallel port?

You're right that BCHW32 doesn't do anything more than writeio64 so if it doesn't work there you would need to investigate why not.

Steve