Successful Install on Watchguard Firebox X700!

drallibor

zerolost

i just installed pfsense on a wg x700 that was mothballed; got the load on ok (that was easy indeed) but none of the interfaces show a link; re0 and re1 are said to up 'up' in ifconfig but they also show as 'no carrier' (as do the rest of the interfaces) and there are no link lights on the front of teh unit; i tried trhee different patch cables- is it possible that they have been disabled in BIOS somehow?

drallibor

On the x1000 even when the battery was totally dead and the bios was reset the nics still worked, default was on. So, unless somebody put a graphics card in your machine, made a connector to attach a keyboard, and set the it to be disabled then they are working.

I did have a problem getting one test machine I had to connect to the re1 (lan) interface initially. It had a lousy nic in it and no matter what I did it just wouldnt connect. Try a different pc, make sure the pc is set for dhcp, and make sure that you configured re1 on the pf/wg to be the LAN and have dhcp enabled.

zerolost

RE: interfaces not linking … (no carrier)

I'M SUCH A NEWB! ... got them to work using a cross-over cable! i'm used to working with switches. :)

getting the front panel display to work would be soooo cool!

gpouser

Hi All,

It would be great if I can install PCI video card and install with keyboard attached.

Thanks if anyone can help on this.

Found: please remove the x in the url to view

httpx://www.watchguard.com/docs/corporate/wg_coreDe-MFR_instructions.pdf

There are six pins next to the floppy disk connector label 1 - 6 in a U shape pin out are these the ones for the keyboard, look the same pattern on a ps2 motherboard ?

CryoGenID

Great Document, thanks!

But where would we get this cable?
Does anyone have the pin-settings for an X1250e?

Is there also onboard-video for which anybody has the pin-settings so that
we can attach the X1250e directly to an TFT?

That would be really great!

Thanks a lot in advance!

Best regards,

Chris

jahonix

@gpouser:

Shows Cables
Keypad: 1448-00x - Flat 1x4 cable; 1.77 in.; 1 ea.
Is it possible to use this for 4 pin for keyboard

Don't think so.
The keypad it references are the four buttons from the front, not a complete keyboard.

CryoGenID

It is a little bit offtopic, but today I wanted to test the pfSense-Installation
again on my X1250e, but the device seems to be broken :(
I did nothing since my last test about a month ago, but now I have
no text written on the LCD and the LEDs (which used to blink somehow while
booting) just all light up steadily and don't blink anymore.
That behavior is also with the original CF-Card from WatchGuard.
CMOS-Reset didn't fix it…

Does anybody have any tips? I simply cannot believe the box should be
dead :-/

Thanks a lot for your help as I would be really happy to get pfSense working
on the X1250e :-)

Best regards,

Chris

gpouser

Hi Chris,

Get down to basics, check that the CF card holder has no bent pins - remove ram then re-seat. If you did anything with the CPU remove heat sink and take out the cpu check thermal paste is not over flow and re-fit.

Try to connect a serial cable onto the box via the com port and see what happens in terminal.

I think there are some pins on the board that set the clock rate of Vt and cpu freq

One way to clear cmos remove batt: power up then remove power cord from the back of unit leave for 15min the replace batt fix back the power cord and power up from wall socket switch

For video output you need a VGA pci card but for this you may need to remove the motherboard. I still do not have pinout's for the firefox x500 keyboard but may need to do some volt testing on the six pins next to what look likes a IDE slot top middle.

The output on the LCD maybe controlled by the config file in the OS on boot up I think

/etc/grub/menu.lst may hold a line on the kernel

Hope this helps

drallibor

I did put a video card in my x1000 using a 1u pci riser card I got off ebay. The keyboard connector on the motherboard of the x1000 is a standard ps2 kb connector, nothing special. It was relatively easy to wire up a connector I removed from an old mother board to the watchguard. I made the cable long enough so that eventually I would be able to mount it out the back of the unit. The video card fit ok with the entire drive bay assembly removed. Theoretically you could put a wireless card in here that pfsense would support as an access point.. or usb ports.. whatever. I mostly wanted the video card so I could easily install ubuntu on the box.

More info on the keyboard connector
This place isnt far from me. http://www.cablesandconnectors.com

They have on this page http://www.cablesandconnectors.com/PIX/CC-085.pdf item BRK-PS2-2x4 which I believe is the exact part if you dont want to go through the hassle of building a cable yourself. If you feel like building one.. well, they have the parts for that too.

The 1u riser card I bought is a reverse direction or Right angle card so that cards hang over the motherboard. You could I guess get a normal left angle card and cut a slot in the side of the case. This would allow you for diagnostic purposes easy access to cards for temporary purposes. It was approx 5$ off ebay from a store called Knightdiscounts. If there was one available I would try and get a flush mount reverse 1u so that the card almost sits flat on the pci connector instead of the quarter inch that mine does. That little bit would look better in the flip down bay on the outside of the x1000.

Somebody said something about onboard video. THere is none one the x1000. There is a place on the motherboard where they have a video connector marked out, but all the chips necessary to make it run are missing and solder filled. Possibly on later models they have it, but on mine its not there.

gpouser

Thanks for this info, just got hold of left hand side u2 riser card from old server. Have the U connector ready but this is what I need to understand

–----------------------
: : : : : : : : : : : : : : FD

Front face of PS2

Have you soldered the cables in this patterns "1 > 1" - "2 > 2" - "3 > 3" - "4 > 4" - ditto

drallibor

correct.. soldered the wires like an extension cable off the motherboard. 1=1 2=2.. etc.

drallibor

2u riser card might not fit with the cover on. be perfect for doing an install though.

Magnacus

@jmcentire:

I just did some testing with the hardware on these things, they currently have a 1.2 Ghz Celeron processor. I swapped it out with a 1.4 Ghz Pentium 3:

Copyright 1992-2007 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of The FreeBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p11 #0: Sun Feb 24 16:38:29 EST 2008
sullrich@builder6.pfsense.com:/usr/obj.pfSense/usr/src/sys/pfSense_wrap.6
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) III CPU family 1400MHz (1403.19-MHz 686-class CPU)
Origin = "GenuineIntel" Id = 0x6b1 Stepping = 1
Features=0x383f9ff <fpu,vme,de,pse,tsc,msr,pae,mce,cx8,sep,mtrr,pge,mca,cmov,pat,pse36,mmx,fxsr,sse>Works perfectly! So if you have any old p3s laying around, swap em out and get a little more performance! Also these boards do support 512 MB sticks of PC133, so as soon as I find some I will be upgrading that as well.

Does anyone know a way to test the performance difference between the two such as ipsec encryption speed or anything?</fpu,vme,de,pse,tsc,msr,pae,mce,cx8,sep,mtrr,pge,mca,cmov,pat,pse36,mmx,fxsr,sse>

Hi,

I tried that too, but my Firebox isn't booting.
Did you just swap the CPU? Had you to change anything, like setting a jumper or so?

(My P3 is a PIII-S SL6BY, 1400Mhz, 512KB, 133Mhz Bus, 1,45V)

EDIT: My Board is a WG-X66 AV1.0B

Phil

Great tutorial. I had some major issues, however, during setup.

I installed from the live cd after putting the laptop drive into an old laptop. I then booted from it and cu (Linux serial console tool) repeatedly disconnected from the serial. This (I guess) missed the mount point option and made the boot fail with an invalid mount. I eventually ended up booting back into the live cd and modifying fstab from the terminal there. Once I did this, the box booted ok but cu continued to disconnect. I connected it up to my other machine and used puTTY, which didn't have such problems.

Moral of the story is, don't use cu.

Regardless, it's working fine now. Next step is to look at swapping out the CPU and upgrading the memory.

Phil

Magnacus

@Magnacus:

(My P3 is a PIII-S SL6BY, 1400Mhz, 512KB, 133Mhz Bus, 1,45V)

EDIT: My Board is a WG-X66 AV1.0B

I got an other P3 CPU stepping:
PIII-S SL5XL http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SL5XL
…but its still not booting :'(

Sifter

Has anyone modified their x700 to include wireless? If so, how did you route the antenna wire and where did you place the antennas on the box itself?

Im still looking for pictures of a hard drive mounted in the drive sled on an x700. Dont want to us CF because Id like to use packages.

Sifter

Is anyone else having issues with correct memory being recognized? Im still at 256meg even with a 512meg pc133 dimm installed.

DimitriRodis

If you are having problems with watchdog timeouts on these devices, that problem may have been resolved, but we need testers.

Please see http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,15669.0.html

MMan

@Sifter:

Is anyone else having issues with correct memory being recognized? Im still at 256meg even with a 512meg pc133 dimm installed.

You need double side dimm to fix that problem.

Successful Install on Watchguard Firebox X700!

–---------------------- : : : : : : : : : : : : : : FD

–----------------------
: : : : : : : : : : : : : : FD