Watchguard Firebox M400/M500
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I wouldn’t mind running the pentium g3420 from the M500 but like the M400’s g1820, it doesn’t support aes-ni. Even though it’s no longer a requirement for 2.5 when ever it does release I would rather not give it up along with the hyper threading. As far as I’m aware the i3 series is the first point where either or both are available.
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Has anyone been able to get their box to boot from usb with an unlocked bios for the purpose of install to a hdd or is it hard locked to prevent this?
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If you use the BIOS @zanthos posted you can do whatever you want. It's completely unlocked. To a dangerous level!
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I just picked up a 4130 off eBay so we’ll see if the rebooting issue goes away when it arrives and I get a chance to install it.
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@stephenw10 said in Watchguard Firebox M400:
If you use the BIOS @zanthos posted you can do whatever you want. It's completely unlocked. To a dangerous level!
I may give it a shot to unlock mine but I’m in no place to unbrick it if it goes badly so we’ll see.
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Hello again,
I thought I would chime in with my M400 deployment progress :)
As noted earlier, the factory M400 accepted 2 x 8GB PC3-14900E DIMMs and I am running an i3-4130 CPU while I wait for my Xeon to arrive.
While waiting, I purchased a Lanner PCI-E Riser for the FW-7585.
Installation was simple enough, however, I have not found a way to enable that slot for PCI-E video yet.
Using a riser on my previous firewall (Caswell CAR-2030) was an easy solution to add VGA output, but so far no joy with same on the M400 + riser.
So I pushed forward and made a custom cable for the onboard VGA header.
As it turns out, the 2mm pitch header is the same as the old 2.5" IDE drives, so I was able to turn this old IDE adapter ...
into this ...
by just soldering up Red, Green, Blue, Hsync, Vsync and Ground.
Works like a charm ! :)
From there, the newly acquired VGA output made backing up the password-protected M400 factory BIOS a much easier task followed by flashing the unlocked/mod'ed BIOS provided by Zanthos.
So things are progressing well now, short of the money invested into the PCI-E riser than may never find a purpose.
But it is what it is :)
Will update again once I install my pending Xeon CPU and take a crack at installing pfSense onto a SATA SSD. -
Update time ! :)
Xeon E3-1265L v3 arrived.
Installed it and posted without issue.
Dropped a 128GB SATA SSD onto SATA4 interface and tucked it into the front left corner.
Pushed USB installer image to CF card.
Powered up and booted from CF.
Installed to SSD without issue.
Reboot and running pfSense 2.4.4 from SSD without issue
:)PS ... fan control set manually to 67
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So it reboots correctly? Did it reboot with the 4130?
Steve
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That is correct Stephen.
At least for me anyway. :)
I have not experienced any issues with either Halt System or Reboot System when I had the i3-4130 installed or while having the more recent E3-1265Lv3 installed. This held true via the webGUI as well as the local VGA console. -
@stephenw10
Good afternoon,I can also confirm my system reboots correctly with the 4130. I just got mine in the mail and swapped it out and it rebooted just fine.
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Hmm, I wonder what's differet about the 4160 and 4370 then...
With the 4160 it would not boot at all when I disabled hyperthreading as a test.
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@stephenw10
Could it be possible that when the bios was written that the 4160 and 4370 didn't exist yet so it was written in a way that just doesn't jive with something in these two processors? Although I don't see why there would be anything truly different other than speed that would cause a conflict. -
Mmm, maybe. They are both 2014 vs 2013 for the CPUs that work as expected. The Xanthos bios has updated modules though and still behaves the same....
Steve
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Hello,
i unlocked my m400 with bios from zanthos. Can i use the same bios file for my m500?
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You almost certainly can (though I've never tried). As far as I know it's the same board.
Do so at your own risk etc.....Steve
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Flashed the Bios on M500 successfully
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@Mookatroid said in Watchguard Firebox M400:
Update time ! :)
Xeon E3-1265L v3 arrived.
Installed it and posted without issue.
Dropped a 128GB SATA SSD onto SATA4 interface and tucked it into the front left corner.
Pushed USB installer image to CF card.
Powered up and booted from CF.
Installed to SSD without issue.
Reboot and running pfSense 2.4.4 from SSD without issue
:)PS ... fan control set manually to 67
Final deployment update :)
My M400 build and bench testing finally wrapped up and I went live with a brand new 120/20 cable ISP with it.
The ISP drop is a single gigabit line to the M400 WAN interface, but I setup a 2xgigabit LACP LAGG between the M400 and my primary switch for PrivateLAN traffic and a 2xgigabit LACP LAGG (with assigned VLAN tagging) for my GuestLAN (both wired and wireless clients).
All is ripping along at a beautiful pace !!
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@eisenb11 Where you ever able to get the LED lights to Arm/ Disarm? If so what steps did you use to achieve this function? I have a WatchGuard m400 with pfSense installed to a 16GB CF Card and the LAN & Wan's are working however I can not get the LEDs to work as with the XTM 5 Series.
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See the post below his question.
https://forum.netgate.com/post/803206
Steve
