Watchguard XTM 5 Series
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@bryanjlaz said in Watchguard XTM 5 Series:
Just a learning experience more than anything really. I got the 1st box for free from a previous employer when they upgraded their network. IT guy told me to "Have at it" with the contents of the big pallet boxes of various equipment they were sending off to the recycling company. At the time I knew what it was but I didn't know it's potential and how sought after of a device it may have been more so at the time (2015). They took really good care of their equipment. Not a scratch, dent, or ding. I must be mistaken on what is required equipment wise to flash it. I take it the aardvark and not the usb with the battery jumper looking clip lol.
Forgot to add. The fact that it was such a good find for free, I hate to see it go to waste.
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@bryanjlaz said in Watchguard XTM 5 Series:
Just a learning experience more than anything really
Oh well go for it then. I learned a lot playing with that box in.... 2012. (Wow).
Technically you can flash the chip using 4 resistors and a parallel port!
Anything that can write to SPI should do it.What you are seeing currently is what happens if the BIOS is corrupt. But it's also what happens if it fails to post for some other reason like bad ram, bad CPU etc.
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Is there any positive outlook on any of the newer units? M200, 400 etc..
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@bryanjlaz From what i have experienced with the XTM 800 Series I had, somehow the watchgaurd device would only want to boot from the CF card as the first device.
Obviously my CF card was not faulty. So I ended up using WIN32DiskImager and imaged the pfsense 2.5.1 image to the CF card.
placed in and rebooted the CF card, and viola, the pfsense booted up.couple of things.
- do not format your CF card. there appears to be a specific sector or something that watchgaurd bios reads from cf card. just image it using the WIN32DiskImager [run as administraor]
- unplug the power adapter and then plug in the CF card.
- only plug in disk, in the 1st sata port, not 2nd sata port. watchguard would not boot up.
- do all of this in the stock hardware[cpu and ram, this way u know all works, and install pfsense]
- once installed, then u can upgrade cpu/ram.
hope this helps.
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@bryanjlaz said in Watchguard XTM 5 Series:
Is there any positive outlook on any of the newer units? M200, 400 etc..
The M200/300 are ARM based so not worth trying currently. The M400 works fine.
Steve
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Hello Guys,
I've had a working pfsense XTM 5 for 4 months, than after upgrading to 2.5 when it came out, it started to crash sometimes and never understand what was causing it, even using 2.4.5.
Left the watchguard on the side for other 6 months and went with a pfsense VM, but after going without internet when doing maintence on the server was a no go.
So I'm revisiting the watchguard pfsense again.
This time I installed the 2.5.2 pfsense version on a new 120gb SSD, new sata cable, and reflashed the bios and looks like its working.
But before going further with pfsense configs and getting it in production I want to ask you guys what changes do you do in the BIOS beside the AHCI option ?
What about the ACPI, you keep it at v1.0 or change it to 2.0 or even 3.0 ?
Any more changes worth doing ?ps: should we choose the MBR Dos partitions or GPT GUID partition table on the install ?
Thanks
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I would use the defaults for partition type. So MBR for UFS and GPT for ZFS if you choose that.
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@stephenw10
When installing pfsense 2.5 the default showed was GPT ZFS and now in 2.5.2 it shows me MBR UFS and got confused.
Using a single SSD for pfsense is better to use the ZFS or UFS ?
I choosed ZFS don't knowing if it was better. -
Not much in it if you have stable power IMO. If you might see power interruptions ZFS is far more robust, far less likely to suffer filesystem damage in the event of an outage.
If you can run RAM drives that removes that problem but isn't really suitable for packages like Snort or pfBlocker. Though it can work.Steve
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Figured I'd try here first.
I've got an XTM 5 series that was running great until I went to upgrade to 2.5.2 last week. The system never came up and when I went to check on the box it was sitting there with the fans running on high and the LCD display has all black boxes showing.
I've done the following with the same results.
Pulled the battery to clear the CMOS.
Tried new RAM.
Tried a new to me CPU.
Disconnected the hard drive and SATA cord.
Tried the original flash drive.
Nothing on the mainboard appears to be fried.
I cannot remember if I flashed the BIOS to something other than what it came with when I first set this up.Any other suggestions or is this thing toast? It doesnt POST. No beeps, no nothing but fans on high and 5 green lights by the fan connectors on the mainboard. Nothing on the console either.
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Mmm, probably nothing you can do if it won't POST even after swapping the CPU and RAM.
I would guess it's bad caps on the board. You might try a different PSU if you have not already.
Steve
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@stephenw10 said in Watchguard XTM 5 Series:
Mmm, probably nothing you can do if it won't POST even after swapping the CPU and RAM.
I would guess it's bad caps on the board. You might try a different PSU if you have not already.
Steve
I have not tried a different PSU but will track one down to try. Its a bummer, this thing was running great before this lol.
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@frosty It's the same problem I had with mine!
Try to let it sit with no power for a day or so.
With mine I could get it up and see it boot this way.It's strange, maybe some faulted hardware or is a Bios/harware incompatibilty with 2.5 version.
Witch cpu does your have?
PS: When I have some time and if I find it again, I will try to test with the original Bios.
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@gaiex said in Watchguard XTM 5 Series:
@frosty It's the same problem I had with mine!
Try to let it sit with no power for a day or so.
With mine I could get it up and see it boot this way.It's strange, maybe some faulted hardware or is a Bios/harware incompatibilty with 2.5 version.
Witch cpu does your have?
PS: When I have some time and if I find it again, I will try to test with the original Bios.
It sat for 4-5 days with no power and the battery removed, same result unfortunately.
I’ll have to check what the original cpu was but I also tried an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400. I was hoping it was the cpu but no luck.
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Mmm, that's quite common on a system with failing caps. It can take multiple attempts to start for example.
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Well its not the power supply. I picked up another XTM 5 for relatively cheap since I had gotten a CPU and additional RAM. I tried its power supply on the dead box, same results. At this point that box is toast.
New to me one is up and running with an E8400 and 4 GB of RAM. Just swapped in the CPU, RAM and old HD and it booted right up.
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I have recently acquired a XTM 5 515 series. I have followed every instruction I could find on installing Pfsesne to it. I installed it to a hard drive and then moved it over after removing the CF card. Bring up the terminal and see the bios post and then I get nothing from the console. I have tried the unplugging the cable from both ends and re attaching it to no avail. I tried changing the speed from 115200 to 9600 and restarting putty, minicom and whatever else I could try.
To no avail do I get the console output past the bios post. I looked in the bios and the console redirect past post is disabled and is set to read only for the bios as all others have been.
I did notice the bios in this unit is 4/26/2010 the ones I have seen having success are prior to this like 4/3/2010.
Any ideas, or possible fixes? It gets to the full load of pfsense and beeps as it is suppose too.
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What image exactly did you use to install to the HD?
If it wasn't the serial console image did you enable the serial console before moving the drive back?
Steve
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Everything I read, no one used the serial console version. So now I know something I did not before. I had not thought about it as much as I have done it using console. I will go back and do it again.
Thank you.
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If you install using the serial console image it will enable the serial console on the resulting install automatically. But to do so you need to do the actual install in something that also has a serial console. Many people don't have access to that.
So you can install from the regular image but be sure to boot at least once in the install device3 so you can access the gui and enable the serial console in Sys > Adv > Admin Access.
Or you can use the serial console image on a CF card to install on the XTM5 itself.
Steve
