Proventia MX1004 Guidance

stephenw10

Are you seeing a link connection, LEDs light up etc?
Once you've changed the LAN to 192.168.2.1/24 as PTT suggested you should be able to connect.
Are you sure which port is msk2?

Steve

Drekarg

Ok guys after the reinstall it's all working! Thank you so much for all your help.

stephenw10

Excellent! :)
The msk driver supports a number of different NICs but some are liable to occasionally suffer a bug and stop sending traffic. If that happens you will see messages in the system logs 'mskX watchdog timeout', Rebooting will bring them back online but a permanent work-around is described here:
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/PfSense_on_Watchguard_Firebox#Known_Issues_2

Steve

ipnightly

Just wondering what CF card you managed to install pfsense on ?

I have tried several cards without much success, although I have booted pfsense from a USB stick and did an install to the hard drive, without too much bother.

stephenw10

What image did you write to the cards? How did you write it? What was the result that lead you to believe it failed?

Steve

ipnightly

I wrote the 2.1.5 4G nano image to 3 CF cards. ! Sandisk Ulta 4Gb and 2 Transcend 4Gb 133x. Booting the memstick image on a 4gb pendrive, was a delight.

Using the CF, the box tries to boot okay but it is painfully slow. Once the config starts the "spinning line" changes position every couple of minutes!
I did try booting from the USB pen drive with a view to doing an install in the same manner as I had already done to a 2.5" HDD in the same box. The result was much the same. Both drives were identified at boot and progress was slooooow.
I gave up in the end and used the 2.5" HDD install that I had already completed and that I am currently using.

I wrote all the images using physdiskwrite and after I have run diskpart to "clean" them.
I had the Sandisk running in a WG X1000, but it was too noisy and used too much power ( well compared to the PIII laptop I was using and this MX1004.

I am just using the box because of its low power requirements and thought with the CF they would be even lower and generate less heat also.

I have a spare box, so I can try out any suggestions without any bother.

Thanks.

ipnightly

A quick update.

I found an old 512mb CF and installed a 512Mb nanobsd 2.1.2 on to it.
The device booted no problem and had it up and running in minutes.

Just need to find out if the image or the CF's are the problem.

stephenw10

This might be a DMA issue. Newer, larger cards supports faster transfer using higher UDMA modes. The standard Nano images have DMA disabled because many CF slots do not support it. However some hardware requires DMA to boot (Soekris). The Nano+VGA images were originally (AFAIK) created for use on those boxes and hence have DMA enabled. If your box has DMA enabled in the BIOS and the slot supports it the card may be reporting it suports it also and some timing out is required.
Try disabling DMA if you can or maybe try the Nano+VGA images (you'll have no serial console though).
I would expect to see something in the logs to support this theory though.

Steve

ipnightly

Good call ! :D

I had typed a longish reply earlier but the board rejected it ( probably the pic I was attaching was too big? 2400K ).
Anyway, I disabled UDMA and had the box running in no time.

Uploaded my saved configs and swapped the boxes over. Job done.
Need to look at making the fans quieter though.

Thanks Steve

icest0rm

@ipnightly:

Need to look at making the fans quieter though.

Thanks Steve

hi,
did u succeed in lowering the fan noise?
I've one of these boxes laying around and it would be nice to run pfSense in it..
but I remember that the fan was a lot noisy…
let me know!
cheers

ipnightly

Steve gave me access to his code for the Fireboxes, but I gave up, as I wasn't getting very far.
I ended up using a splitter cable and a small potentiometer on the two fans on the cpu side and this reduced the noise quite a bit.

However, after doing an update from 2.1.5 I found that I was getting a lot of errors in the logs, relating to the NIC's. It's a while ago so I can't remember all that I did, but I believe it was due to an update in the BSD OS. I went back to 2.1.5 and the problem disappeared. I don't know if the situation has changed in the meantime, but I am looking at other devices that have Intel NIC's and may well replace the Proventia at some point.