PfSense on Maxspeed Maxterm 8300 - problems - need advice

murugan

There are excellent articles out there on installing and running pfSense on Maxspeed Maxterm 8300 series of Thin Clients (eg: http://weblog.mrbill.net/archives/2009/07/26/building-the-perfect-routerfirewall-for-45/)

Unfortunately, I have run into a couple of snags that I hope someone here can help me with.

Problem 1: What is the max size of CF and RAM for a Maxterm 8300?

I have two Maxterm 8300 thinclients (VIA Ezra 800 and VIA C3 - 1 Giga Pro) and I came across your website since I have been trying to set up pfSense on either one of my TCs with no luck. I'm trying to determine what the maximum CF size and RAM they would support. Right now they have 512 Mb CF cards (with XPe) and 512 Mb of RAM.

Problem 2: Writing the images to the CF cards.

I'm going by the book (pfSense: The Definitive Guide by Christopher M. Buechler), but using physdiskwrite to write the images on my WinXP SP3 box always gives me an error on number of bytes written (pfsense v1.2.3, thru 2.0.1) on any of 3 CF cards (512 Mb, 2Gb, and 4Gb) (Brands: PQI, Hitachi, and Sandisk Ultra I and II). If I plug the CF cards in (even with whatever physdiskwrite has written) the TCs will hang with "BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.02"

I have even used a Linux box (Ubuntu 11.04) to dd the image to the CF cards but they will hang on boot as above.

Problem 3:
CF cards larger than 512 Gb will not boot?

I finally set the BIOS to boot off the USB-CDROM and could go through the pfSense install only with the 512Mb CF cards NOT the larger (2Gb and 4Gb) ones (they give me an error hda: DMA Timeout Error: Status=0x58….... retry LBA ....... after booting and during initialization
The BIOS on both TCs recognizes all the CF cards correctly (on "Auto" and on "CHS")

Problem 4: Cannot boot CF card created on one system on another system.

On the Maxterm 8300 with the C3 - 1 Giga Pro CPU (same VT133 chipset, Northbridge, etc as the EZRA 800 133 CPU on the other Maxterm 8300) I cannot set the BIOS to boot from a USB-CDROM (BIOS options are different - only allowing me the choice of LAN, HDD-0, CDROM, Floppy, etc and SCSI-FLASH) so I have to use the 512Mb CF from the EZRA Maxterm 8300 instead. The strange thing is that although the C3 - 1 Giga Pro Maxterm boots with this 512 Mb CF, it will panic after "ELF 32 - Load Image: Read failed. Unable to load kernel!"
The XPe CF cards are interchangeable and will boot perfectly on either box - even though they are different OEM builds by different OEMs

I would appreciate it if you or anyone else reading this could let me know or provide me with a link about the Maxspeed specs and the Neoware FAQ (researching these would help me at least put to rest the max Flash and RAM allowable on these TCs) - Or any advice on upgrading (re-flash) the BIOS or BIOS settings or anything on problems cited above

Thanks in advance.

wallabybob

I would like to clarify a few details:

1. When you write 512Mb do you mean 512M bits or 512M bytes? Its a common convention to write MB for mega bytes and Mb for mega bits. If your boxes have only 512Mbits of RAM (64Mbytes) thats not enough to run pfSense.

2. Do the CF cards on these boxes act as "IDE" drives or USB mass storage?

3. What specific pfSense images (file names please) did you try writing on which cards?

Assuming you meant Mbytes when you wrote Mb:
@murugan:

Problem 1: What is the max size of CF and RAM for a Maxterm 8300?

I have two Maxterm 8300 thinclients (VIA Ezra 800 and VIA C3 - 1 Giga Pro) and I came across your website since I have been trying to set up pfSense on either one of my TCs with no luck. I'm trying to determine what the maximum CF size and RAM they would support. Right now they have 512 Mb CF cards (with XPe) and 512 Mb of RAM.

Since you can apparently boot WinXP on whatever is the box you can probably safely assume it will support whatever is in the box now. The chipset probably supports at least 512MBytes RAM and over 10GBytes hard drive BUT because the box was intended an embedded application the PCB designers may not have run all the address lines to the RAM and the BIOS writers may have taken short cuts and assumed the box would never have to boot from a disk larger than the WinXP flash.

@murugan:

Problem 2: Writing the images to the CF cards.

See question 3 above.

@murugan:

Problem 3:
CF cards larger than 512 Gb will not boot?

I finally set the BIOS to boot off the USB-CDROM and could go through the pfSense install only with the 512Mb CF cards NOT the larger (2Gb and 4Gb) ones (they give me an error hda: DMA Timeout Error: Status=0x58….... retry LBA ....... after booting and during initialization

Please confirm: You successfully booted the pfSense install CD off a CD drive connected to a USB port and then went through the configuration dialogue to selecting option 99, Install to hard drive and then the screen reported retry LBA … ?
What version of pfSense was on the CD? Please repeat and provide a few lines of what was on the screen immediately before the DMA Timeout report and the full text of the DMA Timeout message including all reported numbers.
Does the install to hard drive apparently successfully complete on the 512Mb (b=bytes?) flash? What happens when ou then remove the USB CD and attempt to boot off the flash? Do you get a different result if you set the BIOS to use LBA addressing on the hard drive (if that is possible)?

@murugan:

The BIOS on both TCs recognizes all the CF cards correctly (on "Auto" and on "CHS")

What exactly do you mean by "recognises all the CF cards correctly?" It reports the correct size for the card?

Have you tried booting a pfSense "NanoBSD" image from CF with the BIOS set in "LBA" mode on the hard drive? (I don't know the BIOS provides such a setting but I recall some BIOSes do and I recall circumstances where it made a difference.) You might find you need to restore the original setting to successfully boot WinXP.

stephenw10

The only thing I can add to Wallabybob's questions is that the CF card appears (in the pictures) to be an IDE connected reader. Given that it should support almost any size of card however it won't support CF cards that are DMA/UDMA compatible. It is likely that the cards you have that are larger than 512MB are DMA enabled and that is causing them not to boot.
If you can try disabling DMA/UDMA in the bios.

If you are getting errors writing the image try using a smaller image e.g. 1GB image on the 2GB card.

Steve

murugan

Thanks Steve,
I'll give your suggestion ("disabling DMA/UDMA in the bios" and "try using a smaller image e.g. 1GB image on the 2GB card") a try and report back.
MR

murugan

@wallabybob:

I would like to clarify a few details:

1. When you write 512Mb do you mean 512M bits or 512M bytes? Its a common convention to write MB for mega bytes and Mb for mega bits. If your boxes have only 512Mbits of RAM (64Mbytes) thats not enough to run pfSense.

2. Do the CF cards on these boxes act as "IDE" drives or USB mass storage?

3. What specific pfSense images (file names please) did you try writing on which cards?

Assuming you meant Mbytes when you wrote Mb:

1. I meant Bytes not bits
2. The CF cards act as IDE drives (there is only 1 ide channel)
3. These are the specific pfSense images I tried writing to Hitachi, PQI and Sandisk branded (512Mb and 4Gb) CF cards :
(a) pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img.gz
(b) pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-512mb-i386-nanobsd.img.gz
pfSense-1.2.3-RELEASE-512mb-nanobsd.img.gz
(d) pfSense-1.2.3-RELEASE-4g-nanobsd.img.gz
(e) pfSense-2.0-RELEASE-512mb-i386-nanobsd.img.gz
(f) pfSense-2.0-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img.gz

All from http://files.chi.pfsense.org/mirror/downloads

@wallabybob:

Since you can apparently boot WinXP on whatever is the box you can probably safely assume it will support whatever is in the box now. The chipset probably supports at least 512MBytes RAM and over 10GBytes hard drive BUT because the box was intended an embedded application the PCB designers may not have run all the address lines to the RAM and the BIOS writers may have taken short cuts and assumed the box would never have to boot from a disk larger than the WinXP flash.

I can CF image an XPe from 256Mb thru 1Gb and successfully run them.
I can INSTALL and successfully run a full XP SP3 on a 10Gb CF
So I doubt that BIOS writers assumed that only a 512Mb XPe will be the defacto system.

@murugan:

Problem 2: Writing the images to the CF cards.

I will use Steve's (stephenw10) suggestions (If you are getting errors writing the image try using a smaller image e.g. 1GB image on the 2GB card.) and post back results.

@wallabybob:

Please confirm: You successfully booted the pfSense install CD off a CD drive connected to a USB port and then went through the configuration dialogue to selecting option 99, Install to hard drive and then the screen reported retry LBA … ?
What version of pfSense was on the CD? Please repeat and provide a few lines of what was on the screen immediately before the DMA Timeout report and the full text of the DMA Timeout message including all reported numbers.
Does the install to hard drive apparently successfully complete on the 512Mb (b=bytes?) flash? What happens when ou then remove the USB CD and attempt to boot off the flash? Do you get a different result if you set the BIOS to use LBA addressing on the hard drive (if that is possible)?

Yes, I can set the BIOS to (first boot device) boot from USB CDROM and start LiveCD install - which is successful for the 512Mb CF.

I will set the BIOS to use LBA (my choices in the BIOS menu are Auto, CHS, Large, LBA) and will post back with screen shots since the error messages are too numerous and long to write here.

@wallabybob:

What exactly do you mean by "recognises all the CF cards correctly?" It reports the correct size for the card?

Yes - I mean that the it reports the correct size and also the CHS (cylinders, heads, sectors)

@wallabybob:

Have you tried booting a pfSense "NanoBSD" image from CF with the BIOS set in "LBA" mode on the hard drive? (I don't know the BIOS provides such a setting but I recall some BIOSes do and I recall circumstances where it made a difference.) You might find you need to restore the original setting to successfully boot WinXP.

I will set the BIOS to use LBA (my choices in the BIOS menu are Auto, CHS, Large, LBA) and will post back with screen shots since the error messages are too numerous and long to write here.
To boot into XPe or WinXP, I just set the BIOS to "auto" (auto detect the primary drive)

Did you take a look at the link I provided? (http://weblog.mrbill.net/archives/2009/07/26/building-the-perfect-routerfirewall-for-45/) - it could have been informative.

Thanks for the advice.

stephenw10

All of those images use the serial port as their main console.
Are you connected to the box with a null modem cable?

If not you need to use one of the vga enabled nano images such as: pfSense-2.0.1-RELEASE-1g-i386-nanobsd_vga.img.gz

Steve

murugan

Hi Steve,
Thank you for the reply and the suggestion - I will try the vga image.
The previous images and non-boot problems I have related are with the images booting off the Maxspeed 8300 and connected to a Win XP SP2 box with a null modem cable and a PuTTY terminal (9600 8 N 1 - I could go higher but I thought the higher baud rates may complicate my link).
I will post back - also the boot photographs that I took
Thanks for all the help.

stephenw10

Ah well that's probably not the problem then.
Looks like you're doing everything right. :-\

Steve

dLockers

Hi.

I have a 4GB CompactFlash card installed into a MaxTerm 8300B.

I had to use Ubuntu linux in a virtual machine to get the image to write correctly.

Then you have to boot PfSense in safemode.

Then add to your config a little line to fix the read_dma error.

murugan

@dLockers:

Hi.
I have a 4GB CompactFlash card installed into a MaxTerm 8300B.
I had to use Ubuntu linux in a virtual machine to get the image to write correctly.
Then you have to boot PfSense in safemode.
Then add to your config a little line to fix the read_dma error.

Do you happen to know what the line should read? Better still, do you have a sample config file I can use to get me started - I'm using the same hardware you are using except that I've switched to a 512Mb CF but I do have a 4GB Sandisk Ultra if that will work.
I've tried "no_dma" with no success - also disabling the DMA in the BIOS doesn't seem to help.

How does the pfSense work on the Maxterm 8300? Well, OK, good, very good, excellent?
Also want to know if you overclocked the cpu in the BIOS - the 8300B has a C3 670MHz VIA processor - although the CPU reports as C3 1 Giga on boot. The BIOS does give the option (by multiplier) to overclock and was curious if thsi affected performance. It was on my list of experiments.
Thanks for your help.

fullstop

@murugan:

@dLockers:

Hi.
I have a 4GB CompactFlash card installed into a MaxTerm 8300B.
I had to use Ubuntu linux in a virtual machine to get the image to write correctly.
Then you have to boot PfSense in safemode.
Then add to your config a little line to fix the read_dma error.

Do you happen to know what the line should read? Better still, do you have a sample config file I can use to get me started - I'm using the same hardware you are using except that I've switched to a 512Mb CF but I do have a 4GB Sandisk Ultra if that will work.
I've tried "no_dma" with no success - also disabling the DMA in the BIOS doesn't seem to help.

How does the pfSense work on the Maxterm 8300? Well, OK, good, very good, excellent?
Also want to know if you overclocked the cpu in the BIOS - the 8300B has a C3 670MHz VIA processor - although the CPU reports as C3 1 Giga on boot. The BIOS does give the option (by multiplier) to overclock and was curious if thsi affected performance. It was on my list of experiments.
Thanks for your help.

murugan,

I just set up a pfSense box on a maxterm 3300, which I believe is the same as the 8300 but it originally shipped with linux and had a smaller stock CF card.

Here's what you need to do:

Pick option 7 at boot time. I think it says "escape to loader" or something like that. At the prompt there, enter:

set hw.ata.ata_dma=0
boot

After this, pfSense will boot and avoid the DMA timeouts you saw before.

Once it boots, get to a shell and do the following:

/etc/rc.conf_mount_rw
echo "hw.ata.ata_dma=0" >> /boot/loader.conf.local
/etc/rc.conf_mount_ro

After this, it should boot reliably every time.

I hope this helps.

murugan

Thanks fullstop.
In response to my other question, does the 3300 also have the overclock ability?
And have you tried it?

ceama

@murugan:

Thanks fullstop.
In response to my other question, does the 3300 also have the overclock ability?
And have you tried it?

First off thanks for all the help here getting my 8300b up and running. I did overclock mine by modifying the BIOS with modbin. I got mine to work well at 866 MHz (133 x 6.5). If anyone want the BIOS let me know. It is too big to upload here.

murugan

@ceama:

@murugan:

Thanks fullstop.
In response to my other question, does the 3300 also have the overclock ability?
And have you tried it?

First off thanks for all the help here getting my 8300b up and running. I did overclock mine by modifying the BIOS with modbin. I got mine to work well at 866 MHz (133 x 6.5). If anyone want the BIOS let me know. It is too big to upload here.

Thanks ceama.
Glad to know that there are other avenues to get my 8300b up and running at a faster speed.
I would appreciate your help on modbin and the bios for the 8300b - see my PM to you on both.
Murugan

rubantin

HELP!!!

I have a maxterm 8300. My XP has been corrupted and will not boot… Where can I get an ISO of the OS to reinstall?

murugan

@rubantin:

HELP!!!

I have a maxterm 8300. My XP has been corrupted and will not boot… Where can I get an ISO of the OS to reinstall?

There are no "ISOs" to reinstall the XP OS - the original OS was XP Embedded.
Without knowing what the error message is, I cannot say if the OS is corrupted - it's very hard to corrupt the OS as it is EWF enabled (mostly).
Also: You cannot reinstall XP Embedded by an ISO - You need to flash the CF (Compact Flash card) with an image. I don't know what model you have (8300, 8300B, etc) - it should be on a sticker on the back. Also, when you boot, the opening screen will let you know the BIOS, CPU, RAM and CF size info - let me know what it says. I also don't know what size of CF you have installed - While booting up, press the "DEL" key to get into the BIOS setup. This should let you know what size of CF and the RAM you have installed. The RAM is not important but helpful.
The reason for wanting to know what the CPU and the CF is that each image for XP Embedded is built for a certain size of CF. You can flash a smaller size image to a larger CF but not the reverse.
Let me know on the error message to determine "corruption" and the other details I have listed above and maybe I can help you install a fresh image or repair the old one.

I am a little confused: This is a pfSense forum so XP doesn't appear to be relevant.
If your BSD OS (pfSense) is corrupted, it's an easy matter to reflash the CF with the original pfSense release (eg: 1.2.3) or upgrade to the last release (eg: pfSense-2.0.2-RELEASE-size-arch-nanobsd_vga.img.gz) if you have the USB Stick that you stored the conf files on and be back and running in a matter of an hour.

Please clarify if you need XP help or pfSense help.