Installation on Soekris/ALIX without access to serial port?

[spock521]

Hello,

I'm sorry if this has been asked before (and for english not being my native language), but I have tried searching both here and on m0n0walls forums to find any information about this, but I couldn't find any straight answers.

My problem is this, I own one ALIX board and one Soekris 4801 board, both of which I have happily run both m0n0wall and lately pfSense on. I have been using the embedded image, flashing the CF's and then doing the initial setup over the serial port. One week ago my girlfriends PC was upgraded, and that was the last computer in our house that had a serial port, so now I'm a bit worried about how new installs/upgrades will work out for me.

So for my questions,
Does pfSense (and/or m0n0wall if anyone knows) enable it's LAN-port by itself at first bootup, so I can reach the webgui to do the initial configuration or upload my configuration file from there? That would be brilliant if it did, but I guess it doesn't?

I also found some information about changing the default configuration file inside the image before I flash it, but I would have to install freebsd to do that, which I would like to avoid if possible (although easy with for example VirtualBox/VMware, it feels like a bit too much work. Never the less it seems to be one solution).

There is obviously the option of buying a USB-Serial adapter too, if I can find one.

What would be your advice?

[GruensFroeschli]

Buy an USB-to-serial adaptor.
It's just the easiest way.

[lklaus]

Well, if you don't expect a conflict with your internal addresses, you can boot the alix board and add a virtual ip to your interface (I added 192.168.1.2 to eth1:1 [linux]) and could talk to the board via the webgui

Klaus

[dotdash]

@lklaus:

Well, if you don't expect a conflict with your internal addresses, you can boot the alix board and add a virtual ip to your interface (I added 192.168.1.2 to eth1:1 [linux]) and could talk to the board via the webgui

The problem is, at least with pfSense, that the interface on the Alix will not be up until you complete the 'assign interfaces' dialog via the serial console…
The pre-loaded boxes from Netgate may already have this done, I'm not sure.