Netgate 4200 Behavior: Power Button Standby, LEDs Brightness, Coreboot

YuzuPonzu

Hi! I'm new to the Netgate appliance ecosystem and have some questions about my new Netgate 4200 hardware. These are a few queries that arose during my first boot-to-console session for practice. That's the only thing I've done with the device thus far.

Power Button: How do I get the 4200 unit to power itself off without pulling its physical plug? Pressing the physical power button gracefully unloads the OS (which I can watch on the console) and puts the system into what the docs call a standby mode: diamond LED solid blue + circle slowly pulsing orange. That's as far as it goes though. Following up with a 10-second long-press on the power button once the system is in standby, in hopes of forcing a full power off, seems to do nothing.

Can the button behavior be changed to do a full power off instead? Or is there any reason I should be aware of as to why that might be a bad idea?

LEDs: Is there an easy way to keep the default behavior and meanings of the LEDs but dial their brightness down to something like 5%? Normally I'd solve this kind of WAF problem by electrical tape, but that isn't a complete solution for the Netgate 4200 because a strong glow still escapes the case through all the airflow holes. I've read that the behavior of the LEDs can be controlled wholesale in the OS CLI and have seen older code samples for other Netgate hardware that completely customize color and behavior, but I'm only looking for a brightness control at present if an easy setting is available, without changing official colors or meanings. Even better if it can persist across reboots, OS upgrades, or reinstalls by being part of the pfSense configuration.

BIOS: My 4200 shipped with an AMI UEFI. I've seen photos of old GUIs where other Netgate devices could be flashed with Coreboot. Is that a thing that Netgate still does eventually for their appliances?

Thanks for your consideration as I get my fet wet with Netgate's own appliances.

JonathanLee

https://forum.netgate.com/topic/186169/netgate-2100-customization-of-leds-guide

I customized all my LEDs.
Check it out..

Also my 2100 you have to unplug it to turn it off the ARM processor does not allow the unit to turn off like that.

The LED configuration is the same so check out that thread above.

Hope that helps good luck..

stephenw10

@YuzuPonzu said in Netgate 4200 Behavior: Power Button Standby, LEDs Brightness, Coreboot:

Pressing the physical power button gracefully unloads the OS (which I can watch on the console) and puts the system into what the docs call a standby mode: diamond LED solid blue + circle slowly pulsing orange.

That is the full powered down state (S5). The LED controller is still active but the CPU is not.

You can manually disable the LEDs like:

[24.08-DEVELOPMENT][admin@4200.stevew.lan]/root: ls /dev/led
blue_0  blue_1  blue_2  green_0 green_1 green_2 red_0   red_1   red_2
[24.08-DEVELOPMENT][admin@4200.stevew.lan]/root: echo 0 > /dev/led/blue_2

Or set the LED state with:

[24.08-DEVELOPMENT][root@8200-2.stevew.lan]/root: pfSense-led.sh
usage:
pfSense-LED booting
pfSense-LED ready
pfSense-LED update [1|0]
pfSense-LED updating

But you cannot directly control the brightness.

There is no Coreboot that supports the 4200.

Steve

YuzuPonzu

@JonathanLee said in Netgate 4200 Behavior: Power Button Standby, LEDs Brightness, Coreboot:

https://forum.netgate.com/topic/186169/netgate-2100-customization-of-leds-guide

I customized all my LEDs.
Check it out..

Thanks for the extensive guide on setting LED behavior - it's interesting to learn how they can be customized based on firewall states (something more involved than "off" or "time of day"), which is a cool use case for them. Great idea. I look forward to experimenting when I get pfSense set up.

The 4200 is using an Atom CPU, so power states could be different than how ARM-based devices behave.

@stephenw10 said in Netgate 4200 Behavior: Power Button Standby, LEDs Brightness, Coreboot:

That is the full powered down state (S5). The LED controller is still active but the CPU is not.

Thank you for the confirmation about power states and for the information on basic LED manipulation and coreboot, straight from the source!

I'm glad to know that what I'm seeing on the 4200 is indeed its expected behavior and it is in fact turning off after all, with the intended exception of the LED controller. To reiterate in different words, the intended power behavior is more akin to a TV or receiver (off but LED standby glow) rather than to a PC (fully dark), and it's safe to unplug once the orange glow begins.

I figured it was probably a user education issue, so thanks for the user education.

Upon closer inspection of the LED glow escaping the case airholes, there exist some additional diagnostic LEDs on the motherboard that I suspect may not be addressable by the pfSense LED controller - at least I've never seen reference to anyone doing that. Thus, regardless of what programming we can accomplish with the three case LEDs, we'll need to open the case anyway in order to silence its overglow. I successfully solved my issue and my walls no longer light up - Netgate's SSD guide for the 4200 was easy to follow to open the case up.

For future users who may run across this post, these are the things I did. Tools: thick black electrical tape, scissors, plastic tweezers, plastic watercolors paintbrush, camera. The butt of the paintbrush was used extensively to push tape down into small places, smooth it out onto surfaces, and as a fishtape to pull stuff underneath the motherboard without detatching it.

Clear plastic lightguides on the front face of the case (horizontal); they peek through at the bottom of the motherboard. Can cover everything except the front face that goes into the case LED cutouts.
Horizontal lightguides underneath the motherboard. These are hard to reach individually, so I did one large floor-to-ceiling height belt-like strip attached at the front to get them all at once. The paintbrush can help fish the tape through.
Vertical 3-high lightguide on the back side of the motherboard. Easy to reach and really cover.
Surfaces that lightbleed from the horizontal front might reflect off of: floor underneath motherboard near lightguides.
Surfaces lightbleed from the vertical guides might reflect off of: rear case fascia right next to the lightguide, console port cage side, ethernet ports cage side.
Surfaces light from under-mainboard LEDs (green) reflects off of: silver colored detatchable panel at the bottom of the case. (don't cover up airholes).
Three (3) diagnostic green LEDs on the top surface of the motherboard periodically spaced along the edge by the SSD (labeled D47, D79, D78). They don't stick out and are very small (but mighty!), so it may help to take a photo with the unit powered up for reference.
Two (2) green status LEDs on the SSD if you have the MAX one installed (Innodisk P80 3TE6 on mine). These are on the top surface about a third of the way off the mainboard, two exterior edges next to one of the large chips.
Two (2) green LEDs on the bottom surface of the motherboard on the opposide edge as the top-facing LEDs. These are easiest to access through the removable door on the bottom of the case. I didn't remember to write down their designators.

With all that taped up, there's only a little bit of lightbleed visible from the lightguides if looking directly down into the case (expected as one can never realistically block 100%) and most importantly no overglow at all onto the walls. Much better!