Barracuda F12 LAN ports disabled
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The Barracuda F12 is a cool little x86 box with five LAN ports. The version I just purchased off eBay came with 128GB SSD.
I had no trouble installing pfSense from the downloaded serial console version. It boots up fine but at the "Welcome to pfSense" (serial console) menu, when you try to assign interfaces, you get:
Valid interfaces are:
igb0 00:0d:48:2d:78:f9 (down) Intel(R) I211 (Copper)
igb1 00:0d:48:2d:78:fa (down) Intel(R) I211 (Copper)
igb2 00:0d:48:2d:78:fb (down) Intel(R) I211 (Copper)
igb3 00:0d:48:2d:78:f7 (down) Intel(R) I211 (Copper)
igb4 00:0d:48:2d:78:f8 (down) Intel(R) I211 (Copper)(Plugging in active LAN connections to the F12's ports (e.g. my local switch) make the lights blink next to its connectors, but these physical connections are not detected by pfSense and don't affect this "down" state shown for the NICs.)
Diligent searching turned up the classic web posts for this type of Barracuda pfSense problem:
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/76640/barracuda-310-nics
and a later similar one:
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/169986/pfsense-on-barracuda-webfilter-410The gist of these posts is that some Barracuda firewall hardware is designed to disable the NICs unless the loaded software specifically turn them on. The Barracuda firmware does that of course, but plain pfSense couldn't have known. The solution arrived at in the above referenced posts involved small programs to enable the NICs at boot time. Another fix that applied to the Barracuda 310/410 hardware involved manipulating visible wires.
I popped open the F12 and found that Barracuda has done an extremely clean job on this PCB. There are no wires to manipulate. I have attached an image of the PCB (after removing the Intel SSD drive).
Has anyone devised the solution to enabling the on-board NICs and getting pfSense to work on the Barracuda F12?
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
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The uploaded image of the PCB (I must have deleted this reference in the original post):
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SOLVED. I booted a USB stick of OpenWRT to see if it had the same problem. OpenWRT found working Ethernet ports to assign to WAN and LAN.
However, these were not the ports labeled 0 and 1 on the back of the Barracuda F12.
Close examination of OpenWRT's port assignments revealed that it recognized eth0 (LAN) as physically-labeled port 3 and eth1 (WAN) as physically-labeled port 4.So I rebooted the installed pfSense (serial console). With the new insight gleaned from the OpenWRT experiment, it turns out that pfSense also started with physically-labeled port 3.
Displaying its assignments (annotated by me):Valid interfaces are (with active LAN and WAN cables plugged in):
igb0 00:0d:48:2d:78:f9 (up) Intel(R) I211 (Copper) <-- labeled "3" on box (third MAC in series), pfSense => WAN
igb1 00:0d:48:2d:78:fa (up) Intel(R) I211 (Copper) <-- labeled "4" on box (fourth MAC in series), pfSense => LAN
igb2 00:0d:48:2d:78:fb (down) Intel(R) I211 (Copper) <-- labeled "5" on box
igb3 00:0d:48:2d:78:f7 (down) Intel(R) I211 (Copper) <-- labeled "0" on box (first MAC in series)
igb4 00:0d:48:2d:78:f8 (down) Intel(R) I211 (Copper) <-- labeled "1" on boxConclusion: the Barracuda F12 does NOT disable all of its NICs by default.
However, for some reason, while scanning the hardware non-Barracuda software skips over the first two NICs (in MAC order).Hopefully, this little adventure will save some time and frustration for future pfSense users bringing up a Barracuda F12.
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Yeah, there are no by-pass relays on that box. You can see where they would have been on the PCB just behind the Ethernet ports on a model that had them.
Steve
