Firebox LCD Driver for LCDProc

ridnhard19 · Mar 6, 2008, 12:42 PM

Sure do. I have a tar archive at home with the components that you need to get it up and running. Its really small. When I get home, I'll look at it and post the archive here with a few directions.

ridnhard19 · Mar 7, 2008, 4:14 AM

Here are the directions w/ files! This only has support for the FireBox LCD compiled. I have also noticed the interface stats does not work w/ freeBSD. I've got a full install on my pc and it still doesn't pickup the traffic. I have not dug too much into it. At any rate here it is:

(Copy and paste from shell so you can see exactly how I set it up to install)

I should really wrap a cool GUI around this so it can all be configured from the web console. I do know PHP too, just need to find some time.

I'm using the EMBEDDED VERSION! the install script supports that only - if you are using a full install i'd try and comment out the 2 mount commands as you don't need to re-mount the file system as read-write then back to read-only.

Note: the /var/tmp filesystem resides in memory so you can 'play' here without wearing out your CF card.

This is from some PC to put the archive on the pfsense box.


MacWild:final jayson$ ls
lcdd.tar.gz
MacWild:final jayson$ gunzip lcdd.tar.gz
MacWild:final jayson$ scp lcdd.tar root@***.***.***.***:/var/tmp
Password:
lcdd.tar                                      100%  124KB 124.0KB/s   00:00    
MacWild:final jayson$

Now ssh into the box; make sure ya got it enabled first of course ;)


pfsense:/#  cd /var/tmp
pfsense:/var/tmp#  ls -l
total 126
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  126976 Mar  6 22:30 lcdd.tar
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel     512 Mar  6 22:28 vi.recover
pfsense:/var/tmp#  tar -xvf lcdd.tar
x lcdd
x lcdd/drivers
x lcdd/lcdd
x lcdd/LCDd.conf
x lcdd/lcdd.sh
x lcdd/lcdproc
x lcdd/drivers/curses.so
x lcdd/drivers/sdeclcd.so
x install-embed.lcdd.sh
pfsense:/var/tmp#  chmod 700 install-embed.lcdd.sh 
pfsense:/var/tmp#  ./install-embed.lcdd.sh 
pfsense:/var/tmp#  mount
/dev/ufs/pfSense on / (ufs, local, read-only)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
/dev/md0 on /tmp (ufs, local)
/dev/md1 on /var (ufs, local)
/dev/ufs/pfSenseCfg on /cf (ufs, local, read-only)
devfs on /var/dhcpd/dev (devfs, local)
pfsense:/var/tmp#

Now you can reboot or just 'cd' over to the run-scripts directory and start it up so you can keep that stellar 'up-time' figure


pfsense:/var/tmp#  cd /usr/local/etc/rc.d
pfsense:/usr/local/etc/rc.d#  ls
lcdd.sh		lighttpd
pfsense:/usr/local/etc/rc.d#  ls -la
total 5
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel   512 Mar  6 22:31 .
drwxr-xr-x  4 root  wheel   512 Feb 24 17:37 ..
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   174 Mar  6 22:31 lcdd.sh
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1184 Sep 11 13:00 lighttpd
pfsense:/usr/local/etc/rc.d#  ls
lcdd.sh		lighttpd
pfsense:/usr/local/etc/rc.d#  ./lcdd.sh
pfsense:/usr/local/etc/rc.d#

The driver currently does not have support for vertical filled histograms - its only a 2x20 LCD so I wrote the horizontal fill functions - I need to finish that but I really didn't need it so I pushed it to the back burner for now.

http://files.pfsense.org/misc/lcdd.tar.gz

(Can this file be put on one of the pfSense servers?) – Thanks! I've updated my url

Valhalla1 · Mar 7, 2008, 8:50 AM

thanks ridnhard19 for posting this, I'll try it out soon

cmb · Mar 10, 2008, 3:13 AM

ridnhard19: I copied this file to http://files.pfsense.org/misc/lcdd.tar.gz

If you ever want to make any updates, just email me (cmb@pfsense.org) the file as an attachment and I'll update it.

I may see about including this in our lcdproc package at some point if time permits.

jmcentire · Mar 13, 2008, 9:39 PM

I added the driver to my LCDproc package install, I added the following to:
/usr/local/pkg/lcdproc.inc
Under the /* lcdproc default driver definitions */:

				case "sdeclcd":
					$config_text .= "[{$lcdproc_config['driver']}]\n";
					$config_text .= "BackLight=yes\n";
					break;

And added the following to: /usr/local/pkg/lcdproc.xml
In the drive options section.

                                <option><value>sdeclcd</value>
					<name>sdeclcd</name></option>

Then copied the attached "sdeclcd.so"(remove the ".txt") to "/usr/local/lib/lcdproc/"

So now the LCD works, it says LCDproc Server and on the second line says Cli: 0 Scr: 0

But I couldn't get the LCDproc service to start, so I had to do that manually from the terminal:

"lcdproc -s 127.0.0.1 -p 13666 C M U"

Now the LCD works awesome!

ridnhard19: Thanks for the driver! Hopefully we can get this in the LCDproc package and make it work.

sdeclcd.so.txt

jmcentire · Mar 13, 2008, 10:22 PM

Well, I just followed my own instructions on my other firebox and it worked without me having to start lcdproc from the terminal. And the options on the screens page work as well. Not sure what happened to the first one though ???

ridnhard19 · Mar 14, 2008, 3:49 AM

Cool; I'm glad its working!! A package for this would rock too where you can click options and it up via web interface…. Maybe after i finish up this big project at work I'll have a life again and can tinker.

Valhalla1 · Apr 13, 2008, 11:01 PM

thanks ridnhard19,
got this working well on my pfsense watchguard's lcd, switching between cpu and memory stats

and let us know if you ever get it to display network related stuff

binco · May 11, 2008, 10:25 AM

I tried this on my firebox 2 and the lights are blinking, but they doesn't make any sense. Can you please give me the sourcecode or adapt this driver for the firebox 2?

Thanks…

Dayblade · Aug 6, 2008, 11:16 PM

Since this has been rolled up in the LCDProc package - which driver did you write for the x700? I cannot seem to find the name of the driver in question as well as what port did you assign it (parallel port?, usb com1?)

Thanks again guys. One less X700 on the market.

Dayblade

MeatPuppet · Oct 23, 2008, 6:16 PM

@Dayblade:

Since this has been rolled up in the LCDProc package - which driver did you write for the x700? I cannot seem to find the name of the driver in question as well as what port did you assign it (parallel port?, usb com1?)

Thanks again guys. One less X700 on the market.

Dayblade

Just a bump.

Did you ever figure out what driver and port the lcd should be run as?
Or do you still have to install in manually?

shepimport · Nov 20, 2008, 7:06 AM

This is awesome… I loaded pfsense on my X500 by popping in a 2GB CF and upgrading the RAM to 512... Truthfully I never expected it to work this well, if at all, since I did it without looking if anyone had done it before. The LCD just tops it off and makes it look great... On ebay most used watchguards go for less than $50 usd since the live security subscription is so much which basically junks the box. This is a perfect appliance for pfsense and with the 6 NICs it really takes it to the next level.

I hope this makes it to a package for the faint of heart!

Being less of a programmer and more of a network guy I ahve been having a hard time adjusting what the LCD reads out. I went through the .conf file but did not see any per line settings... where can i go to edit how/what the LCD displays?

MMan · Nov 20, 2008, 7:50 AM

It works perfectly on X750 too. On FreeBSD 7 based versions of pfSense it doesn't work without tricks becose missing libraries libc.so.6 and libkvm.so.3.

trendchiller · Nov 27, 2008, 10:53 PM

fix it by:

cd /lib
ln -s libc.so.7 libc.so.6
ln -s libkvm.so.4 libkvm.so.3

then it works

MMan · Nov 28, 2008, 9:22 AM

@trendchiller:

fix it by:

cd /lib
ln -s libc.so.7 libc.so.6
ln -s libkvm.so.4 libkvm.so.3

then it works

Yup. I did that.

Friend also recommended using libmap.conf instead of ln, but I didn't get myself to try it yet.

dizydiz · Dec 14, 2008, 6:48 PM

Hi. Kinda new to this. I got a 128 MB card loaded with the PFSense but need some more detailed newb type help to get the LCD portion to work. Can anyone help me?

Thanks for your time,

Jess
Dizydiz@gmail.com

mike56 · Jan 7, 2009, 3:20 PM

I am also new and interested in getting the LCD to work on my Firebox. 1.2.1 final works great from CompactFlash otherwise.

drallibor · Jan 8, 2009, 9:21 PM

what is the chance somebody will get the buttons on the firebox x series working within lcdproc? prior to installing pfsense on my watchguard I had full ubuntu server installed using lcd4linux. The latest version of lcd4linux supports 100% the sdec lcd on the firebox x series as well as the buttons. I was able to configure screens and reboot the firebox through the interface.

The aptitude version of lcd4linux doesnt have this support, only the latest v10.1 rc2 version does which I manually downloaded and installed on top of the v10.0 that is available through aptitude.

ridnhard19 · Mar 11, 2009, 2:09 PM

In response to a couple requests; I've posed the LCDproc driver code for the lcd. I've been informed we might be able to make a charmap for the hd44780 standard driver in LCDproc. Doing this would allow the buttons to work too!

Source code is posted on my site: http://www.ktechs.net/

Phil · Apr 13, 2009, 9:00 AM

Works fine here on 1.2.3-RC1, even without the symlinks. As I run an embeded kernel on a HDD, I just had to comment out the 2 mount lines in the install script before running.

Would be nice to see the buttons working.

Phil