Re: [Soekris] net5501: FreeBSD ipfw and the elusive 75Mbps throughput -SOLVED

[Jed Clear]

On Jun 18, 2016, at 9:13 AM, Jed Clear <cl...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
On Jun 14, 2016, at 8:50 PM, Jed Clear <cl...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> On Jun 9, 2016, at 11:01 PM, Andrew Atrens <and...@atrens.ca> wrote:
>> On 2016-06-09 8:47 PM, Jed Clear wrote:
>>>> Thanks for the replies so far.  Looks like I’ll have to wait until 
>>>> Saturday to test further. Starting with an L2 bridge seems like a good 
>>>> baseline to try.  Although will probably take the easier step of just NAT 
>>>> w/o rules first.
>>> At it's most basic, an l2 bridge can be created using -
>>> 
>>> ifconfig bridge0 create
>>> ifconfig bridge0 addm vr0 addm vr1 up
>> 
>> Had an interesting time getting this working.  First no “device if_bridge” 
>> in my kernel (and nanobsd set to not install any kernel modules).  Installed 
>> a new kernel and configured the bridge.  But can’t DHCP across the bridge0.  
>> Finally had to directly attach the laptop to cable modem, let it DHCP and 
>> then reinstall the net5501 bridge.  At that point I was able to download at 
>> 83.  While directly connected to do the DHCP, the same test got 90.  But was 
>> GbE to the cable modem.  So I’m thinking 83 is pretty good for 100BASE-T 
>> interfaces.
>> 
>> The bridge test didn’t come off until now because I’d forgotten a few real 
>> life things I had to do.  But I did do some more thinking and googling 
>> during the time away.   I don’t think I mentioned that I’m still set up to 
>> do NAT with natd and ipfw divert.  Got to thinking that switching in and out 
>> of the kernel context a few times a packet might not be too good for 
>> throughput.  So next I’m going to see if I can change that over to ipfw 
>> kernel NAT.  Don’t even recall that there was a kernel nat option when I 
>> first set this up, many, many moons ago.  Probably have to add another 
>> kernel option….  
> 
> Of course it required a new kernel option.  In fact it required two.  I will 
> spare you the tale of figuring the second one out.  As many have commented on 
> other boards, ipfw kernel NAT is not well documented.  
> 
> But it was worth it.  I now get 82 Mbps download through the 5501, with 
> essentially the same firewall rule set.   I did drop dummynet and the inbound 
> server NAT rules as I no longer have a static IP and I haven’t decided if I’m 
> going the dynDNS course or sign up for external hosting/VPS/cloud.  And I 
> believe inbound FTP will no longer be an an option as the “punch” dynamic 
> rules only work with natd.  But FTP is no loss.

One loose end, polling.  I flipped that back on just now and still tested at 
83.   With the earlier results, it would imply polling and natd is a very band 
combination for performance.

-Jed

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Re: [Soekris] net5501: FreeBSD ipfw and the elusive 75Mbps throughput -SOLVED

[Jed Clear]

On Jun 14, 2016, at 8:50 PM, Jed Clear <cl...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
On Jun 9, 2016, at 11:01 PM, Andrew Atrens <and...@atrens.ca> wrote:
> On 2016-06-09 8:47 PM, Jed Clear wrote:
>>> Thanks for the replies so far.  Looks like I’ll have to wait until Saturday 
>>> to test further. Starting with an L2 bridge seems like a good baseline to 
>>> try.  Although will probably take the easier step of just NAT w/o rules 
>>> first.
>> At it's most basic, an l2 bridge can be created using -
>> 
>> ifconfig bridge0 create
>> ifconfig bridge0 addm vr0 addm vr1 up
> 
> Had an interesting time getting this working.  First no “device if_bridge” in 
> my kernel (and nanobsd set to not install any kernel modules).  Installed a 
> new kernel and configured the bridge.  But can’t DHCP across the bridge0.  
> Finally had to directly attach the laptop to cable modem, let it DHCP and 
> then reinstall the net5501 bridge.  At that point I was able to download at 
> 83.  While directly connected to do the DHCP, the same test got 90.  But was 
> GbE to the cable modem.  So I’m thinking 83 is pretty good for 100BASE-T 
> interfaces.
> 
> The bridge test didn’t come off until now because I’d forgotten a few real 
> life things I had to do.  But I did do some more thinking and googling during 
> the time away.   I don’t think I mentioned that I’m still set up to do NAT 
> with natd and ipfw divert.  Got to thinking that switching in and out of the 
> kernel context a few times a packet might not be too good for throughput.  So 
> next I’m going to see if I can change that over to ipfw kernel NAT.  Don’t 
> even recall that there was a kernel nat option when I first set this up, 
> many, many moons ago.  Probably have to add another kernel option….  

Of course it required a new kernel option.  In fact it required two.  I will 
spare you the tale of figuring the second one out.  As many have commented on 
other boards, ipfw kernel NAT is not well documented.  

But it was worth it.  I now get 82 Mbps download through the 5501, with 
essentially the same firewall rule set.   I did drop dummynet and the inbound 
server NAT rules as I no longer have a static IP and I haven’t decided if I’m 
going the dynDNS course or sign up for external hosting/VPS/cloud.  And I 
believe inbound FTP will no longer be an an option as the “punch” dynamic rules 
only work with natd.  But FTP is no loss.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] net6501 clock drift

[Jed Clear]

On Jun 18, 2016, at 6:37 AM, Embedding Linux  wrote:
> We have a bunch of net6501 boxes around here. The hardware clock suffers
> from quite high clock drift (4 to 10 secs a day, depending on the box).
> 
> We are using NTP, so the soft clock is in sync (this is how we
> discovered the hw clock drift). But when the boxes reboot, the soft
> clock starts from the hw clock, and getting back to sync takes time (up
> to several days).

You didn’t mention what OS you’re using (although I suppose your e-mail handle 
is a clue).  

However it is customary to write the system time to the hardware clock on 
shutdown, assuming you’re doing a graceful shutdown/reboot.  Otherwise look at 
adding a cron job to do the same thing on a periodic basis.  

I would also look at doing an initial “ntpd -q -G” (formerly ntpdate) on boot, 
before starting ntpd normally.  Which should make the value of the h/w clock 
irrelevant, except for early boot logging.  And even then, ntpd will log how 
far the  time is adjusted, so you could reconstruct accurate time for the early 
log values if this is critical.

> Is such a big hw clock drift usual on 6501 ?

Can’t answer for the 6501 specifically, but PC time of day clock crystals have 
traditionally had a huge variation in quality.  And I don’t think any of them 
are temperature compensated. But it’s been a long time since I read up on this, 
so YMMV.

Of course being a h/w geek, I added a Garmin GPS puck to my 5501 to keep time.

-Jed

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Re: [Soekris] net5501: FreeBSD ipfw and the elusive 75Mbps throughput

[Jed Clear]

On Jun 9, 2016, at 11:01 PM, Andrew Atrens <and...@atrens.ca> wrote:
On 2016-06-09 8:47 PM, Jed Clear wrote:
>> Thanks for the replies so far.  Looks like I’ll have to wait until Saturday 
>> to test further. Starting with an L2 bridge seems like a good baseline to 
>> try.  Although will probably take the easier step of just NAT w/o rules 
>> first.
> At it's most basic, an l2 bridge can be created using -
> 
> ifconfig bridge0 create
> ifconfig bridge0 addm vr0 addm vr1 up

Had an interesting time getting this working.  First no “device if_bridge” in 
my kernel (and nanobsd set to not install any kernel modules).  Installed a new 
kernel and configured the bridge.  But can’t DHCP across the bridge0.  Finally 
had to directly attach the laptop to cable modem, let it DHCP and then 
reinstall the net5501 bridge.  At that point I was able to download at 83.  
While directly connected to do the DHCP, the same test got 90.  But was GbE to 
the cable modem.  So I’m thinking 83 is pretty good for 100BASE-T interfaces.

The bridge test didn’t come off until now because I’d forgotten a few real life 
things I had to do.  But I did do some more thinking and googling during the 
time away.   I don’t think I mentioned that I’m still set up to do NAT with 
natd and ipfw divert.  Got to thinking that switching in and out of the kernel 
context a few times a packet might not be too good for throughput.  So next I’m 
going to see if I can change that over to ipfw kernel NAT.  Don’t even recall 
that there was a kernel nat option when I first set this up, many, many moons 
ago.  Probably have to add another kernel option….  

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] net5501: FreeBSD ipfw and the elusive 75Mbps throughput

[Jed Clear]

> On Jun 9, 2016, at 11:01 PM, Andrew Atrens <and...@atrens.ca> wrote:
>> On 2016-06-09 8:47 PM, Jed Clear wrote:
>> With the current set up, I ran top during the download.  Never got lower 
>> than 25% idle time on the CPU.  ~30% system and and 40+% interrupt.  384M 
>> (of 512M) Free on memory, so no issue there.  So doesn’t seem to be pegging 
>> the CPU with my full rule set.  
> That's interesting.  The relationship between cpu use and throughput is
> pretty linear.  You should be able to 'peg' your cpu unless something
> (ipfw?) is somehow throttling.   You don't have, by chance, 'options
> DUMMYNET'  configured?

My regular rules do have dummy net queues on the uplink, which are now OBE.  
And I had initially overlooked the bandwidth setting there. In any event, the 
built in "simple" rule set doesn't I think. 

> It might also be an tcp-ack-prioritization issue.  You did mention that
> your uplink speed was kind of crappy.   Uplink saturation will affect
> downlink speed if tcp acks aren't getting upstream quickly enough. 
> Maybe ipfw is somehow exacerbating that.

5-6Mbps, crappy only in that $BIG_CABLE_CO disabled 5 of the 8 uplink channels 
when they "provisioned" my cable modem. 

> If the l2 bridge thing works and you're able to peg your net5501 cpu
> then, notwithstanding vr driver fixes you're probably at the limit.
> 
> BUGS
> The vr driver always copies transmit mbuf chains into longword-aligned
> buffers prior to transmission in order to pacify the Rhine chips.  If
> buffers are not aligned correctly, the chip will round the supplied
> buffer address and begin DMAing from the wrong location.  This buffer
> copying impairs transmit performance on slower systems but cannot be
> avoided.  On faster machines (e.g. a Pentium II), the performance
> impact
> is much less noticeable.

Interesting. You'd think the drivers would align the packets on Rx and I 
vaguely recall that FreeBSD managed to go zero copy a few major versions ago.  
Although that could be for straight forwarding.  IPFW and NAT might behave 
differently.  Not sure I'd have any control over it. 

Also recalled that I was running ntpd and named (caching) on the 5501. Turning 
off ntpd added 5 to the download speed. Turning both off didn't increase that. 
Didn't think to unplug the GPS which causes a 1 PPS DCD interrupt as well as 
the 4800 bps serial interrupts. Will give that a try, too. I have the PPS 
option in the kernel if anyone knows of an interaction. 

-Jed

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Re: [Soekris] net5501: FreeBSD ipfw and the elusive 75Mbps throughput

[Jed Clear]

Thanks for the replies so far.  Looks like I’ll have to wait until Saturday to 
test further. Starting with an L2 bridge seems like a good baseline to try.  
Although will probably take the easier step of just NAT w/o rules first.  
Switching to pfsense or a 6501 were already further down my option list, so 
agree with those.  

Had not considered just a change to pf, but will mull over.  Although if I’m 
going to learn a new syntax, might as well get the pretty interface to go with 
it (pfsense) assuming I can get the performance.  

With the current set up, I ran top during the download.  Never got lower than 
25% idle time on the CPU.  ~30% system and and 40+% interrupt.  384M (of 512M) 
Free on memory, so no issue there.  So doesn’t seem to be pegging the CPU with 
my full rule set.  

-Jed

On Jun 8, 2016, at 8:18 PM, Jed Clear <cl...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> I just climbed out of the bronze age of home networking (DSL) and now have 
> "75Mbps service” from $BIG_CABLE_CO (iron age?).  Before the DSL was the 
> bottle neck.  Now it appears the 5501 is the bottle neck.  My net5501-70 has 
> long been running nanobsd (FreeBSD 9.3-R) and ipfw as my perimeter 
> router-firewall-nat.  While I’m not expecting 75, especially in the evening, 
> it’s not even close.  Note all the speeds mentioned are download speeds in 
> Mbps.  The upload is much worse, but not bothered by that in this exercise.
> 
> When the cable modem was first brought up, a laptop directly on it pulled 56 
> with one of the speed test sites.  The cable modem channel power and SNR 
> don’t look bad.  Putting the 5501 in-line dropped the speed to the 30s.  Some 
> googling later and I discover FreeBSD’s polling feature.  So I added options 
> DEVICE_POLLING to the kernel config (HZ was already 1000), baked a new image, 
> set all the interfaces to polling and … it dropped like a rock to 5 Mbps.  
> Flipping off polling on the three interfaces brought it back to the 30s.  
> 
> I tried the built in “simple” firewall rule set, and that did modestly better 
> than my, perhaps overly complicated, rule set.  It got around 44.  I will 
> work that later.
> 
> Anyway I’m a bit baffled by the negative results when enabling polling.  And 
> any other advice on improving the performance through the 5501 would be 
> appreciated.  I haven’t given up on self help, but need a break from google 
> for a bit so will appeal to the collective wisdom of soekris-tech.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Jed
> 
> PS: To add insult to injury, I just repeated the directly connected laptop 
> experiment and clocked over 90.  :-(
> 
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[Soekris] net5501: FreeBSD ipfw and the elusive 75Mbps throughput

[Jed Clear]

I just climbed out of the bronze age of home networking (DSL) and now have 
"75Mbps service” from $BIG_CABLE_CO (iron age?).  Before the DSL was the bottle 
neck.  Now it appears the 5501 is the bottle neck.  My net5501-70 has long been 
running nanobsd (FreeBSD 9.3-R) and ipfw as my perimeter router-firewall-nat.  
While I’m not expecting 75, especially in the evening, it’s not even close.  
Note all the speeds mentioned are download speeds in Mbps.  The upload is much 
worse, but not bothered by that in this exercise.

When the cable modem was first brought up, a laptop directly on it pulled 56 
with one of the speed test sites.  The cable modem channel power and SNR don’t 
look bad.  Putting the 5501 in-line dropped the speed to the 30s.  Some 
googling later and I discover FreeBSD’s polling feature.  So I added options 
DEVICE_POLLING to the kernel config (HZ was already 1000), baked a new image, 
set all the interfaces to polling and … it dropped like a rock to 5 Mbps.  
Flipping off polling on the three interfaces brought it back to the 30s.  

I tried the built in “simple” firewall rule set, and that did modestly better 
than my, perhaps overly complicated, rule set.  It got around 44.  I will work 
that later.

Anyway I’m a bit baffled by the negative results when enabling polling.  And 
any other advice on improving the performance through the 5501 would be 
appreciated.  I haven’t given up on self help, but need a break from google for 
a bit so will appeal to the collective wisdom of soekris-tech.

Thanks,

-Jed

PS: To add insult to injury, I just repeated the directly connected laptop 
experiment and clocked over 90.  :-(

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Re: [Soekris] Limitations of Net6501 as a network bridge

[Jed Clear]

I haven't explored iptables in bridge/layer 2 mode, but there is no fundamental 
reason you can't packet sniff or firewall traffic in bridge mode. The traffic 
has to pass through your kernel. 

If you were asking about FreeBSD and ipfw,  I'd say yes, just look into the 
layer 2 filter points.  So I'd recommend digging into the iptables 
documentation for something similar.  Also not familiar with snort, but with 
tcpdump, I'd specify the interface and I'm pretty sure it would work as it is 
capturing at layer 2 (or am I thinking of Wireshark?).

-Jed

 On Jun 25, 2015, at 8:56 PM, Nick Gyurov ngyu...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 Bridging works on OSI levels 1  2, IP is a level 4 protocol, so IP
 services - not so much.
 I'm not sure what can be done with snort, no experience with it.
 -
 Regards,
 Nick
 
 
 On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 6:51 AM, Robin Kipp mli...@robin-kipp.net wrote:
 Hi all,
 I just successfully installed Debian 8 on a Net6501. Basically, I’d like to 
 use this device as a transparent network gateway between my computers / 
 network appliances and the router. The reason I’d like to do this is to use 
 an IDS system such as Snort for security purposes and to monitor certain 
 aspects of my personal web traffic.
 To accomplish this, I’ve now configured a network bridge named br0 and added 
 all of the ethernet interfaces as members. This seems to work pretty well as 
 far as I can tell, I have eth0 hooked up to the router and my other machines 
 connected to the 3 remaining ports. Of course, this means that the Net6501 
 is pretty much transparent now and does not, for example, show up as a 
 gateway when running a traceroute command to an external host.
 I generally like this a lot and think it’s quite sensible to pass things 
 like DHCP and NAT on to the router, rather than installing a separate DHCP 
 server on the Net6501 and using iptables to NAT between the Soekris box and 
 the router’s subnet. Since I’m doing this for the very first time, however, 
 I’m wondering whether I’m on the right path, or if such a setup would impose 
 certain limitations that I might not be aware of.
 For example, can I use a tool like Snort on the Net6501 and analyze all the 
 traffic passing through the Net6501, or could I be facing any issues when 
 doing this on a bridged network?
 Also, I’m guessing that with this approach, any routing / firewalling of 
 traffic (e.g. by using iptables) is out of the question, right? For example, 
 I would think that it’s probably not possible to use iptables to block 
 traffic originating from certain IP addresses, or to route certain traffic 
 through a configured VPN tunnel, etc…
 If any of you guys have more experience with network bridges, I’d be very 
 happy if you could answer my questions and / or share your observations with 
 me. Like I said I’m doing this for the first time, so there may well be 
 things that I haven’t even thought of yet! :-)
 Thanks a lot!
 Robin
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Re: [Soekris] com speed changing during boot

[Jed Clear]

Assuming OpenBSD still shares some similarity to FreeBSD, there are three 
places the speed is set. The one not mentioned so far is the console setting 
for the getty in /etc/ttys. 

-Jed

 On Jun 6, 2015, at 8:20 PM, Nikola (Nick) Gyurov ngyu...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 It's 'set ConSpeed=9600'.
 Case-sensitive.
 All explained here: https://soekris.com/media/manuals/net6501_manual.pdf
 -
 Regards,
 Nick
 
 
 On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 7:56 AM, Jeff Simmons j...@j-simmons.net wrote:
 On Saturday, June 06, 2015 04:20:28 pm Christian Weisgerber wrote:
 On 2015-06-06, Jeff Simmons j...@j-simmons.net wrote:
 I have suddenly run into a problem with one of my Soekris net6501 boxes.
 When I first boot it, the com speed is 19200, but just before the boot
 prompt it switches to 9600. This is raising problems with upgrading the
 OS (OpenBSD). Any idea what's wrong, and anything I can do to fix this?
 
 That's due to different defaults in the Soekris comBIOS (19200) and
 the OpenBSD boot loader (9600).  If you want to switch the latter to
 19200, add
 stty com0 19200
 to /etc/boot.conf.
 
 Tried that, doesn't work. It goes at 19200 up until the boot prompt, switches
 to 9600 after, and then goes to 19200 at the login: prompt. Can't read the
 /etc/boot.conf file until the HD is mounted.
 
 Alternatively, you could set the comBIOS to
 9600.
 
 How does one do that? I tried several commands after Ctrl-P early in the boot
 process, but kept getting 'syntax error'.
 
 I have about a dozen net6501s running OpenBSD, and this is the first time 
 I've
 seen this.
 
 --
 Jeff Simmons   j...@j-simmons.net
 Simmons Consulting - Network Engineering, Administration, Security
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Re: [Soekris] Can't connect to net6501

[Jed Clear]

Assuming you dropped a zero and tried 19,200 and above, I would at least try 
9,600.  If that fails, it's probably best to try all the lower speeds as well.  
And try eliminating the crossover. 

You could also try removing the SSD to see if you get the BIOS to come up. 

-Jed

 On Jan 17, 2015, at 9:20 AM, Johannes Graumann johannes_graum...@web.de 
 wrote:
 
 Hello,
 
 I am trying to start playing with a net6501 whcih I stuck a 120GB SSD into.
 
 I connect the box via a crossover serial cable to a iogear Usb to serial 
 RS-323 adapter, moprobe pl2303 on my linux box and when plugging the 
 adapter 
 in, can see /dev/ttyUSB0 comming up via udevadm monitor. Using cutecom, 
 bautrate 1920 and above device, I seem to be able to connect, but no matter 
 what I do (power off/on, reset, etc.) - there's no communication showing up 
 in the cutecom windows ... can anybody spot what I'm doing wrong her?
 
 Sincerely, Joh
 
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Re: [Soekris] Compact Flash lifetime/failure detection?

[Jed Clear]

 
 I am now worried that my Soekris could go the same way.  That machine is
 net5501 running FreeBSD.

You can use the nanobsd configuration script to build FreeBSD. It only writes 
to the CF when you upload a new build of the OS image. And then it only updates 
alternating halves of the card. It was designed when flash was smaller and 
writes were a big concern, but it's still FreeBSD.  See the FreeBSD Handbook 
and nanobsd man page for more details.  I've been using nanobsd and an old 
camera CF on my 5501 since I got it. 
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Re: [Soekris] Booting FreeDOS from USB bootable key on net6501

[Jed Clear]

First thing that comes to mind is that FreeDOS might not boot headless.  If it 
is designed to, it might reset the console speed.  Something to check on before 
worrying about more intricate possibilities. 

-Jed

 On Aug 12, 2014, at 3:58 PM, ML mail mlnos...@yahoo.com wrote:
 
 Hello,
 
 I would like to boot from my USB bootable key which contains FreeDOS 1.1 on 
 my net6501 in order to upgrade the BIOS of a few SATA hard drives (I have an 
 eSATA connector attached to my net6501).
 
 Unfortunately when I issue a boot 81 nothing happens.
 
 Any clue what I am doing wrong? or is it simply not possible to boot FreeDOS 
 on a net6501?
 
 Regards
 ML
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Re: [Soekris] 32 GB SanDisk Ultra hangs net5501

[Jed Clear]

Something basic perhaps, like did the boot sector and loader get properly 
installed?   Although I would expect some complaint from the comBios in that 
case. 

Next thing, is you OS image configured for a serial console in all boot stages. 
I can only speak about FreeBSD, where ISTR three files need touching. 

-Jed

 On Jun 10, 2014, at 5:43 AM, Sebastian Reitenbach 
 sebas...@l00-bugdead-prods.de wrote:
 
 Hi,
 
 I bought a SanDisk Ultra 32GB, in order to upgrade the disk in my net5501,
 however, with the new CF card plugged in, the box doesn't boot it stops here:
 
 comBIOS ver. 1.33  20070103  Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Soekris Engineering.
 
 net5501
 
 0512 Mbyte MemoryCPU Geode LX 500 Mhz 
 
 Pri Mas  SanDisk SDCFHSNJC-032G
 
 And then just hangs, I waited a couple of minutes before power cycled the
 box. I tried with all three comBIOS version available from the downloads site 
 [1]
 More googling, I found some related issues with solutions on that page here 
 [2]
 However, also setting the flash=secondary
 only changed the last line starting with Pri Mas to Pri Sla
 but it still did hang.
 
 I tried this CF card on my desktop, and I was able to access it without issue.
 
 Other than having the COM speed set to 9600, no other changes to the settings
 of the box.
 
 Any other ideas I could approach, besides trying different CF cards from
 other vendors?
 
 cheers,
 Sebastian
 
 [1] http://soekris.com/downloads.html
 [2] http://soekris.com/Issue0006/
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Re: [Soekris] Net6501 error

[Jed Clear]

On Jan 18, 2014, at 5:46 AM, ws8pnil...@sneakemail.com wrote:
 i have a problem with my net6501-50. It was working well since 2
 years but today it didn't boot. I have the power and error leds lit
 and nothing on the serial console.
 
 I have the same problem with my net6501-50. Sometimes it helps to enter
 the management console (enter +++ over the serial console and wait
 one second) and just pretend to update the BIOS (download command) but
 let the zmodem transfer time out. After that just hit the hardware
 reset switch. Most of the time mine will boot then.
 
 It seems not working for me. Did you see something on the console when you 
 type +++.
 I have nothing on the console (after i power cycle or type +++ on the 
 console).
 Also when i press the reset button only the 4 network leds flash. And the 
 error led is always lit.

Probably a long shot, but if you had set the serial port speed in COMBIOS to 
other than the default, 19,200, try setting your terminal to 19,200 and see if 
you see any error messages or can get the +++ to work.  Also, if you have 
another Soekris box, verify that your terminal is working (again a longshot 
with that error LED on).  

IIRC, the error LED will stay on if it cannot access any bootable media 
(somebody correct me if I'm wrong).  Try verifying your boot media on another 
computer, or at least reseating all its connections.

 Can i do something else ?

Of course you can. My personal favorite (at least in nice weather) is to take a 
walk over to the local establishment and have them pull me a mug of my favorite 
ale.

 Do i need to return the motherboard ?

Possibly, but one more thing to try is a different power supply.  The OEM wall 
wart supplies that Soekris resells don't have a great track record.  The two 
I've had failed, producing different symptoms.  So it's always worth trying a 
different one when unexplained problems are encountered.

 If some soekris engineer read this message, perhaps they have already seen 
 this problem.

Occasionally you will see a reply from THE Seokris himself.

-Jed

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Re: [Soekris] Net6501 error

[Jed Clear]

On Jan 18, 2014, at 9:52 AM, ws8pnil...@sneakemail.com wrote:

 
 Le 18 janv. 2014 à 15:13, Jed Clear jclear-at-speakeasy.net |Soekris/Forward 
 to  (FAC)| dy7lscn...@sneakemail.com a écrit :
 
 
 IIRC, the error LED will stay on if it cannot access any bootable media 
 (somebody correct me if I'm wrong).  Try verifying your boot media on 
 another computer, or at least reseating all its connections.
 
 
 But i doesn’t see the bios so i think it never go do far.

While double failures aren't the norm, it would still be worth your while to 
confirm your boot media is in working order.  Here's a scenario: you get a 
power spike or surge that damages the serial port because it was connected to a 
terminal with different grounding and you were booting off an external disk 
enclosure with yet another ground.  Admittedly this is even less likely if you 
are using an internal USB drive.  But the more you eliminate, the better.

Also if you're using an internally powered hard drive, it could be causing a 
problem with the 12V power.  Not sure if Soekris used old school RS-232 
voltages, but if so, that's another place that using the 12V power.  I'd also 
strip anything added to the board at this point and see if you get the BIOS 
with just power and the terminal attached.  You'd want to try that anyway 
before sending the board back.

-Jed

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Re: [Soekris] HOWTO Soekris BIOS Settings From OS??

[Jed Clear]

 On Dec 2, 2013, at 9:31 AM, Hendrickson, Kenneth khend...@harris.com 
 wrote:
 
 --- Matthias Flege wrote:
 ... BIOS reflash from the uManager.
 
 I assume that this is a program one can run from an OS which flashes the BIOS.
 
 I have a Net5501 on which the console appears to have died.  It will boot 
 just fine if the disk is already set up, but there is no serial port console. 
  Neither is there a POST message, or the 

Have you checked to see that you don't have a serial speed mismatch?  I've 
encountered times where that would result in no characters. And the speed while 
in the BIOS is not necessarily the same as when the OS is running. And the boot 
loader could even be at a third speed.  Also worth checking with flow control 
disabled/ignored. 

-Jed

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Re: [Soekris] net6501 won't cold boot (will reboot without problems)

[Jed Clear]

Do operational considerations let you swap that msata into another 6501, to see 
if the problem follows or not?

-Jed

On Sep 12, 2013, at 1:50 PM, Michael Sierchio ku...@tenebras.com wrote:

 
 I have a net6501 that will not boot properly from power-on. It's the only one 
 in my stable of many net6501-70s that will not do so.  
 
 This is with FreeBSD 9.1, but same behavior is observed with other (older) 
 versions.  There is no difference when fastboot is disabled or enabled, so 
 I've disabled it here for brevity.  If I press Enter at the boot prompt, it 
 boots (the default works).  This same mSATA drive will autoboot on all the 
 other boxes I have.  
 
 Has anyone run across this before?  It doesn't do it every time, but having a 
 box that doesn't reliably boot after a power event is - er - suboptimal. 
 
 - M
 
 schnipp hier
 
 
 POST: 0123456789bcefghipsajklnopqr,,,tvwxy
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 comBIOS ver. 1.41c  20121115  Copyright (C) 2000-2011 Soekris Engineering.
 
 net6501
 
 2048 Mbyte MemoryCPU Atom E6xx 1600 Mhz 
 
 
 SATA AHCI BIOS ver. 0.61 20121115  Copyright (C) 2003-2011 Intel Corporation
 
 Controller Bus#02, Device#06, Function#00: 02 Ports, 01 Devices
   Port-00: Hard Disk, INTEL SSDMAEXC020G3   
   Port-01: No device detected
 
 Soekris USB Expansion ROM ver. 1.01  20111203
 
 
 Initializing Intel(R) Boot Agent GE v1.3.72
 PXE 2.1 Build 089 (WfM 2.0)
 
Seconds to automatic boot.   Press Ctrl-P for entering Monitor.
 -
 FreeBSD/x86 boot
 Default: 0:ad(0p2)/boot/loader
 boot: 
 
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Re: [Soekris] help in booting FreeBSD 9

[Jed Clear]

You should also review the FreeBSD handbook. There was a section on serial 
consoles. There may be new steps for version 9 that I haven't encountered as 
I'm sticking with 8.x for a bit. And you can double check the ones I did 
recall. 

You could also check the logs on your PXE and TFTP server(s) to see if all the 
expected files were requested and transferred successfully. 

-Jed

On Aug 8, 2013, at 3:16 AM, Igalson Jacek - Korpo TP jacek.igal...@orange.com 
wrote:

 
 Hi Chris,
 
 Thank you for your suggestions concerning comconsole and speed.
 I set baudrate 9600 consitently in Soekris and server according to 
 loppefaaret advice on this mailinglist.
 I also set boot_serial=-h according to hint by Jed Clear.
 
 The last status of my booting is: 
 
 boot f0
 
 NSC DP83815/DP83816 Fast Ethernet UNDI, v1.03 
  
 Copyright (C) 2002, 2003 National Semiconductor Corporation
 All rights reserved.
 
 Pre-boot eXecution Environment  PXE-2.0 (build 082)
 Copyright (C) 1997-2000  Intel Corporation
 
 
 CLIENT MAC ADDR: 00 00 24 CF D8 F8.  
 DHCP.|CLIENT IP: 192.168.1.45  MASK: 255.255.255.0  DHCP IP: 192.168.1.10
 GATEWAY IP: 192.168.1.10 
 TFTP. TFTP.\|PXE Loader 1.00
 Building the boot loader arguments
 Relocating the loader and the BTX
 Starting the BTX loader
 C o n s o l e s :   i n t e r n a l   v i d e o / k e y b o a r d  B I O 
 S   d r i v e   C :
 i s   d i s k 0   P X E   v e r s i o n   2 . 1 ,   r e a l   m o d e   e n t 
 r y   p o i n t  
 @ 9 e 6 4 : 0 0 f 6  B I O S   6 3 9 k B / 1 3 0 0 4 8 k B   a v a i l a b l 
 e   m e m o r y   
 F r e e B S D / x 8 6   b o o t s t r a p   l o a d e r ,   R e v i s i o n   
 1 . 1  
 ( r o o t @ o b r i a n . c s e . b u f f a l o . e d u ,   T u e   J a n 
 3   0 6 : 4 0 : 0 1   
 U T C   2 0 1 2 )  p x e _ o p e n :   s e r v e r   a d d r :   1 9 2 . 1 6 
 8 . 1 . 1 0  
 p x e _ o p e n :   s e r v e r   p a t h :   / u s r / p u b l i c / f r e e 
 b s d 9 0 /  
 p x e _ o p e n :   g a t e w a y   i p : 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 1 . 1 0  |  /  
 -  \  |  /  
 
 end process hangs.
 
 My concern is about the message: Consoles: video/keyboard. Is it OK?
 
 Last message is from bootstrap loader:  pxe_open:gateway ip: 192.168.1.10
 192.168.1.10 is my file server (TFTP and NFS server) 
 Characters  |  /  -  \  |  / suggest that something is loaded to Soekris,
 but I may not see it.
 
 Could someone interpret the messages and explain what is the stage of 
 installation?
 
 Regards,
 Jacek 
 
 -Wiadomość oryginalna-
 Od: Christopher Hilton [mailto:ch...@vindaloo.com] 
 Wysłano: 6 sierpnia 2013 17:42
 Do: Igalson Jacek - Korpo TP
 DW: soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com
 Temat: Re: [Soekris] help in booting FreeBSD 9
 
 
 On Aug 5, 2013, at 5:14 AM, Igalson Jacek - Korpo TP 
 jacek.igal...@orange.com wrote:
 
 
 Hello,
 
 I am new to the Soekris. I try to install FreeBSD on Soekris 4801-48 
 with CF memory (8GB). I followed excellent guide for PXE booting 
 FreeBSD 9.x:
 http://freebsd.so14k.com/freebsd9_pxe.shtml
 
 To communicate with Soekris I use terminal Minicom (19200baud and  8N1) 
 on PC with FreeBSD 9.0.  
 
 I got the following output on terminal:
 
 boot f0
 
 Looks like you are getting caught out by a couple of issues with booting 
 FreeBSD on a soekris. 
 
 1. The FreeBSD pxeboot infrastructure assumes you are booting onto a 
 machine with a VGA card and keyboard. Once the kernel loads it transfers over 
 to the syscons driver and you can't see the output anymore
 
 2. The Soekris serial port defaults to 19200, 8n1 and the FreeBSD serial 
 console assumes 9600, 8n1.
 
 
 In some of your instructions you'll find a section that has you writing 
 modifying the file '/boot/loader.conf' to have the line:
 
 console=comconsole
 
 in it.  That specifies that the kernel should use the serial port as a 
 console. With just that you should expect to see the kernel boot and then the 
 output will turn to hash because the serial speed is wrong. At this point you 
 could drop out of minicom and restart it with a speed of 9600 baud. 
 Alternatively you can add the line:
 
 comconsole_speed=19200
 
 That will keep the console speed at the default for the soekris. There are 
 lots of instructions for pxebooting a soekris into FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 on the 
 net and there are differences in all of them because the different versions 
 of FreeBSD have had various hangups.
 
 -- Chris
 
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Re: [Soekris] ODP: help in booting FreeBSD 9

[Jed Clear]

On Aug 6, 2013, at 8:30 AM, Igalson Jacek - Korpo TP jacek.igal...@orange.com 
wrote:

 Hi Jed,
 
 Thank you for your interest and advice.
 
 Concerning serial speed: I switched comBIOS parameter: ConSpeed=9600
 and ajusted Minicom in my PC accordingly. 
 
 Problem with -h: I set boot_serial=-h in file 
 /usr/public/freebsd../boot/default/loader.conf
 Is this what you had in mind?

It's been a while since I set mine up, but that seems reasonable. 

 In results, Minicom captured following message: 
 
 boot f0
 
 NSC DP83815/DP83816 Fast Ethernet UNDI, v1.03 
  
 Copyright (C) 2002, 2003 National Semiconductor Corporation
 All rights reserved.
 
 Pre-boot eXecution Environment  PXE-2.0 (build 082)
 Copyright (C) 1997-2000  Intel Corporation
 
 
 CLIENT MAC ADDR: 00 00 24 CF D8 F8.  
 DHCP.|CLIENT IP: 192.168.1.45  MASK: 255.255.255.0  DHCP IP: 192.168.1.10
 GATEWAY IP: 192.168.1.10 
 TFTP.  TFTP.\\PXE Loader 1.00
 
 Building the boot loader arguments
 Relocating the loader and the BTX
 Starting the BTX loader
 C o n s o l e s :   i n t e r n a l   v i d e o / k e y b o a r dB I O S  
  
 d r i v e   C :   i s   d i s k 0   P X E   v e r s i o n   2 . 1 ,  r e a l  
  
 m o d e   e n t r y   p o i n t   @ 9 e 6 4 : 0 0 f 6  B I O S   6 3 9 k B / 
 1 3 0 0 4 8 k B   
 a v a i l a b l e   m e m o r y   F r e e B S D / x 8 6   b o o t s t r a p   
 l o a d e r ,   
 R e v i s i o n   1 . 1  ( r o o t @ f a r r e l l . c s e . b u f f a l o . 
 e d u ,   
 T u e   J a n 3   0 6 : 5 1 : 4 9   U T C   2 0 1 2 )  p x e _ o p e n :  
  
 s e r v e r   a d d r :   1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 1 . 1 0  p x e _ o p e n :   s e r 
 v e r   p a t h :   
 / u s r / p u b l i c / f r e e b s d 9 0 /  p x e _ o p e n :   g a t e w a 
 y   i p : 
 1 9 2 . 1 6 8 . 1 . 1 0  |  /  -  \  |  /  
 
 Can you guess where we are and what is missing?

I think your missing something in your PXE setup, but since I don't use PXE 
myself, I'm going to defer to others on the list. 
 
 Regards,
 Jacek
 
 -Wiadomość oryginalna-
 Od: Jed Clear [mailto:jcl...@speakeasy.net] 
 Wysłano: 5 sierpnia 2013 12:57
 Do: Igalson Jacek - Korpo TP
 Temat: Re: [Soekris] help in booting FreeBSD 9
 
 There are three places you need to adjust to deal with the 19200 serial 
 console in FreeBSD, IIRC. You need to tell the loader to use 19200. You need 
 to pass -h to the kernel.  And finally you need to change the speed of the 
 getty. 
 
 Some of us find it more expedient to change the BIOS speed to 9600 so we 
 don't have to adjust the other two. Still need the -h. 
 
 -Jed
 
 On Aug 5, 2013, at 5:14 AM, Igalson Jacek - Korpo TP 
 jacek.igal...@orange.com wrote:
 
 
 Hello,
 
 I am new to the Soekris. I try to install FreeBSD on Soekris 4801-48 
 with CF memory (8GB). I followed excellent guide for PXE booting 
 FreeBSD 9.x:
 http://freebsd.so14k.com/freebsd9_pxe.shtml
 
 To communicate with Soekris I use terminal Minicom (19200baud and  8N1) 
 on PC with FreeBSD 9.0.  
 
 I got the following output on terminal:
 
 boot f0
 
 aC DP83815/DP83816 Fast Ethernet UNDI, v1.03 
  
 npyright (C) 2002, 2003 National Semiconductor Corporation
 rl rights reserved.
 e
 te-boot eXecution Environment  PXE-2.0 (build 082)
 npyright (C) 1997-2000  Intel Corporation
 i
 
 :IENT MAC ADDR: 00 00 24 CF D8 F8  
 sIENT IP: 192.168.1.45  MASK: 255.255.255.0  DHCP IP: 192.168.1.10   
  
 eTEWAY IP: 192.168.1.10 
 lE Loader 1.00   
  
 o
 silding the boot loader arguments
 nlocating the loader and the BTX
 oarting the BTX loader
 C
 
 I see that in the end of printout cursor jumps to the line just next to 
 boot f0 runs forwards and backwards several times than stops and terminal 
 hangs. 
 
 Port Eth0 shows activity, LEDs are on but there is no answer 
 for ping and ssh.
 
 Is something wrong with terminal parameters? I use 19200baud 8N1 and
 VT102 or ANSI, is that ok ? 
 Or boot loader BTX is working badly.
 
 I would appreciate your advice and help.
 Jacek
 
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Re: [Soekris] Problem with net6501

[Jed Clear]

On Jan 19, 2013, at 8:18 PM, Christian Lavoie christian.lav...@gmail.com 
wrote:
 Ok, quick update -- managed to make it boot after removing the lan1841
 that I ordered with it (OpenBSD now installed and working like a
 charm).
 
 So, as far as I can tell: with the lan1841 the main CPU refuses to
 boot, and uManager doesn't see the Flash BIOS (df reports zeroes
 everywhere I checked by hand).
 
 Without the lan1841, everything works fine (except I'm short 4 network
 ports, obviously). It seems a tight fit to plug it in, is the
 rackmount case known to be 1-2mm too short?

If you haven't already, you might want to see what happens if you remove the 
6501 from the case and try it with the lan1841 on the bench.  It's possible, if 
there was a tight fit, that something was distorted enough to short out.  

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] net6501 GPIO

[Jed Clear]

From the description, they would appear to be writeable addresses that would 
allow you alter select outputs without knowing the current state of the 
output.  So writing an 0x0080 to 0688 would clear bit 7 to 0 and leave the 
others in their current state.  Writing 0x0808 to 068c would set bits 11 and 3 
to 1 without changing any other.  That's how I read it based on what you just 
posted, so YMMV.

-Jed

On Jan 10, 2013, at 8:03 PM, Matt Dainty m...@bodgit-n-scarper.com wrote:

 I've been writing a driver for the GPIO as implemented by the FPGA on
 the net6501 and I was wondering if someone (Soren?) could clarify the
 purpose of some of the I/O ports.
 
 From the archive, I have the following information regarding the GPIO:
 
 I/O Port 0680  bit 15..0  gpio input
 0684  bit 15..0  gpio output
 0688  bit 15..0  gpio reset bit when '1'
 068C  bit 15..0  gpio set bit when '1'
 0690  bit 15..0  gpio dir '0'=input, '1'=output
 
 The first, second and fifth I/O ports seem fairly obvious; read state
 from the first, write state to the second in the case of output pins
 and change the direction with the fifth but I can't work out what the
 third and fourth I/O ports are used for, they always seem to read as 0.
 
 Could someone explain how they're supposed to be used?
 
 Matt
 -- 
 Never rub another man's rhubarb.
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Re: [Soekris] Bridging OpenBSD

[Jed Clear]

On Apr 25, 2012, at 2:07 PM, Lars Noodén wrote:
 I am connecting four hosts to the Internet via a net5501 running
 OpenBSD.  I would like also to be able to ping and ssh between these
 hosts directly rather than having each on a separate subnet.
 Where should I be looking to set up such capabilities?
 
 +-net5501--+
 |  |
 host1 ---+--vr0--?  |
 |  |
 host2 ---+--vr1--?  |
 |  ?--re0--+isp dhcp
 host3 ---+--vr2--?  |
 |  |
 host4 ---+--vr3--?  |
 |  |
 +--+
 
 My first guess was to add vr0 - vr3 to a bridge and try to assign an IP
 number to the bridge, but that does not work.

I'll assume you've seen http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq6.html#Bridge

Can you expand on does not work?  Do you mean host1-4 can't ping each other?  
Or they can't ping the IP on the net5501 bridge interface?   Or they can't 
reach the Internet through the net5501 (assuming that is the ultimate goal)?

If hosts1-4 can't ping each other, do you still have /etc/hostname.vr0-3 with 
the up?  Can you post the output of ifconfig -a?  Any network related log 
entries from a reboot?

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] net6501: are the E6xx LVDS pins available as pads anywhere?

[Jed Clear]

On Mar 1, 2012, at 8:28 PM, Andrew andrew_soek...@16paws.com wrote:

 Hi, I've been looking into upgrading my aging firewall from a pentium-m 
 running FBSD 4+ to something more recent.
 
 Since I've stumbled over the net6501, I have tried researching it as 
 much as possible.  My firewall is also my GPS strat-1 NTP server, UPS 
 monitor and DHCP server, among other services.  Because I use a KVM to 
 switch VGA between servers, I am looking at a simple VGA solution for 
 the net6501.  Options using the PCIe x1 are constrained by Intel's 
 crippling of the bus to version 1.0a - the AMD FirePro 2270 x1 is PCIe 
 2.1, the nVidia Quadro series is PCIe 2.0, and HIS ATI Radeon HD5450 is 
 2.0 (as well as doubling the power requirements).  The onboard Atom E6xx 
 does include Intel's third tier graphics on the die, with separate pipes 
 to LVDS and SDVO outputs.  Converting LVDS to VGA is a simple $30 
 problem.  Does anyone know if the LVDS signal are exposed as pads or are 
 the balls not connected?
 
 Additionally, looking at the EG20T datasheet, it appears that only UART0 
 includes hardware handshake signals (8-wire interface).  The other 3 
 UARTS only bring out Rx  Tx signals (2-wire interface).  This gets to 
 be a problem implementing a PPS NTP kernel which requires the handshake 
 lines, unless the console serial port is not UART0.  Or the internal 
 video is available (and, obviously, the BIOS supports it, ugh).

I've had no problems with a Garmin GPS 18 LVC feeding a PPS FreeBSD kernel via 
the internal serial port's DCD pin on my 5501. Based on Soren's response, it 
sounds like the 6501 is similarly endowed. 

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] vr0 using OpenBSD stops responding.

[Jed Clear]

On Dec 10, 2011, at 7:50 AM, Frank Schuhmann wrote:
 Because you wrote that the Win XP was not producing the problem, but Win 7
 should do it, it is perhaps the TCP window scaling, as declared in the RFC 
 1323.
 In some similar other cases it was sometimes fixing the problem (pfsense) and 
 in
 sometimes also not, but to quick test it out the spended time will to be of
 value.   
 On the BSD side perhaps you try to turn of the scaling, I´m not an OpenBSD
 professional but it must be turn out by setting up a shell order likes sysctl
 -w net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=0 
 If not or it must be typed in, in other direction it will be super that 
 perhaps
 an OpenBSD familiar list member would correct this please.

RFC1323 affects the end to end TCP connection.  Unless there is a proxy running 
on the 5501, its RFC1323 settings won't change things.  But I agree with this, 
and the previous poster, that a likely cause is Win7 using RFC1323 and other 
TCP optimizations (e.g. SACK) for more efficient transfers, so the 5501 is 
working harder.

However another thing occurs to me.  I wonder how Path MTU is being dealt with 
in this scenario.  I have far too much experience[1] with various tunneling 
methods (e.g. VPN) that do not correctly support Path MTU Discovery.  We ended 
up with the ugly, but effective, kludge of artificially lowering the MTUs on 
the server and client network stacks to compensate.  And about half the time 
when we deploy something new, it breaks until we remember to change the default 
MTU setting.  Perhaps these new Windows 7 boxes don't have that applied, so 
you're getting a lot of fragmenting at the 5501, and possibly reassembly 
(although often this is left to the receiving host to do).  Seems like a long 
shot as the usual symptoms for us is no bulk traffic, but YMMV.

-Jed

[1] The painful sort.
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Re: [Soekris] Official net6501 bios update

[Jed Clear]

On Dec 5, 2011, at 3:03 PM, Jim Pingle wrote:
 I did make one change. Because that image does not have the serial
 console enabled I mounted the image on another FreeBSD box and activated
 the serial console in /boot/loader.conf.local like so:
 boot_multicons=YES
 boot_serial=YES

Did you create a /boot.config file with -h in it?  

In fact that's all I have done, I don't have the two settings above in my 
loader.conf file.  Of course I run my console at 9600 so didn't need those.  To 
run at 19200, you also need comconsole_speed=19200 in your 
loader.conf[.local] file.   You also need to edit /etc/ttys to keep the 19200 
speed.  I found the path of least resistance was to change the comBIOS speed 
setting to 9600 once, so I could use the FreeBSD defaults w/o having to 
remember to tweak each build in multiple places.

I'm running NanoBSD 8.2R-p2 on a net5501.

-Jed


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Re: [Soekris] Updating net6501 on Mac OS problem

[Jed Clear]

On Dec 3, 2011, at 12:21 PM, Tom Weustink wrote:
 I am using Zterm on Mac OS X (10.7.2) since afaik that is the only terminal 
 program able to send data files.
 I tried sending using XMODEM as described on the wiki page for updating, and 
 the file seems to arrive alright.
 But when I issue the flashupdate command, all I get is Error, Incorrect 
 signature of BIOS image.
 
 I first downloaded the BIOS file with Safari, and second with a terminal 
 command (wget alias to curl -O).
 No luck on both sadly.
 
 Anything that I am missing here? Hope to get this box booting from USB as 
 it's been laying around for almost 2 months now.

At a guess, are you working at the commBIOS Monitor prompt?Updating via 
commBIOS is broken until you get this update installed.   Catch-22, so you need 
to use the lower level uManager, as described in Soren's e-mails to the list.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] 5501-70 AC adapter stops working

[Jed Clear]

On Tue Nov 15 10:18 , Jay Em Cee  sent:
I've experienced this a couple of times now. The first time was quite
perplexing, and it was only on a lark that I tried a spare AC adapter
that I had. I thought the whole unit had gone tango uniform. I don't
have skills to disassemble the AC adapter and figure out where things
have gone wrong inside.

The mode of failure is that the unit won't boot; it doesn't even get far
enough in the boot process to start writing output to the serial port,
so I get no indication whatsoever as to what's going on.

The Power, Error, and Disk LED lights light up, with the disk LED
blinking rapidly. There is a faint clicking sound from inside, almost as
if the adapter isn't supplying enough juice for the disk to spin up
(using a Hitachi 7200 RPM, 5V, 1.1A 100GB disk).

I am using Soekris-supplied SMP Technology, Inc.-branded 12V, 1.5A AC
adapters, FWIW.

I'm asking about this now because I'm out of spare adapters, and I need
to order more. I'm wondering if I have a bad batch or if there's
something I have mis-spec'd when I built these out.

Any thoughts appreciated,

If you search the mailing list archives, you'll find you're not the first.  I 
don't recall if I posted about it myself, 
but I've gone through two.  The first time Soekris replaced it immediately, the 
second time I went with another source.

-Jed
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[Soekris] NanoBSD Reboot failure

[Jed Clear]

I'm running NanoBSD (FreeBSD 8.2R) on a net5501.  It generally runs great, but 
every time I go to reboot it, I get an error and it doesn't reboot.  Same error 
for halt, reboot, and shutdown.

net5501# uname -a
FreeBSD net5501 8.2-RELEASE-p2 FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE-p2 #0: Sat Jul 16 12:26:17 
EDT 2011 
r...@fbsdam3.my.domain:/usr/obj/nanobsd.custom/i386/usr/src/sys/JEDWALL  i386
net5501# halt
/sbin/halt: Input/output error.
net5501# shutdown now
/sbin/shutdown: Input/output error.
net5501# reboot
/sbin/reboot: Input/output error.
net5501# 

On the console there is a bit more info:
login: vnode_pager_getpages: I/O read error
vnode_pager_getpages: I/O read error
vnode_pager_getpages: I/O read error

Fortunately I can reach out and touch it and give it a hard boot when necessary 
(new builds, generally), but I'd like to fix it.  The NanoBSD configuration 
file I use is included below.  

-Jed


NANO_NAME=custom
NANO_SRC=/usr/src
NANO_KERNEL=JEDWALL
NANO_ARCH=i386
NANO_IMAGES=2
JEDWALL_DIR=/home/clear/jedwall

CONF_BUILD='
NO_KLDLOAD=YES
NO_NETGRAPH=YES
NO_PAM=YES
'

CONF_INSTALL='
NO_ACPI=YES
NO_BLUETOOTH=YES
NO_CVS=YES
NO_FORTRAN=YES
NO_HTML=YES
NO_LPR=YES
NO_SENDMAIL=YES
NO_SHAREDOCS=YES
NO_EXAMPLES=YES
NO_CALENDAR=YES
NO_MISC=YES
'
#NO_INSTALLLIB=YES
#NO_MAN=YES
#NO_SHARE=YES

CONF_WORLD='
NO_MODULES=YES
NO_KERBEROS=YES
NO_GAMES=YES
NO_RESCUE=YES
NO_LOCALES=YES
NO_SYSCONS=YES
NO_INFO=YES
'
#

FlashDevice SanDisk 1G

cust_nobeastie() (
touch ${NANO_WORLDDIR}/boot/loader.conf
echo beastie_disable=\YES\  ${NANO_WORLDDIR}/boot/loader.conf
)

install_packages () (
mkdir -p ${NANO_WORLDDIR}/packages
cp ${JEDWALL_DIR}/pkg/* ${NANO_WORLDDIR}/packages
chroot ${NANO_WORLDDIR} sh -c 'cd packages; pkg_add -v *;cd ..;'
rm -rf ${NANO_WORLDDIR}/packages
rm -f ${NANO_WORLDDIR}/usr/local/etc/thttpd.conf
ln -s /etc/www/thttpd.conf ${NANO_WORLDDIR}/usr/local/etc/thttpd.conf
)

install_jedwall_files () (
cp -Rp ${JEDWALL_DIR}/Files/etc/ssh ${NANO_WORLDDIR}/etc/ssh
cp -RL ${JEDWALL_DIR}/Files/* ${NANO_WORLDDIR}
cp /etc/master.passwd ${NANO_WORLDDIR}/etc
pwd_mkdb -p -d ${NANO_WORLDDIR}/etc ${NANO_WORLDDIR}/etc/master.passwd
ln -s /var/named/etc/namedb ${NANO_WORLDDIR}/etc/namedb
)
customize_cmd cust_comconsole
customize_cmd cust_install_files
#customize_cmd cust_allow_ssh_root
customize_cmd cust_nobeastie
customize_cmd install_packages
customize_cmd install_jedwall_files


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Re: [Soekris] FreeBSD - Quick help needed...

[Jed Clear]

In some sort of cosmic coincidence I'm literally replacing half a 8.1 GEOM 
Mirror right now (it's running a disk verification from the controller now).  
Luckily for me I caught it earlier than you, when only one of the drives was 
coughing up hard read errors.   In the interim I was able to take the 
parition(s) with the bad reads out of their mirrors, but that's not going to 
help you any, sorry.  

In the past I think I kept a drive doing by using dd to just force a write onto 
that sector, of course that clobbered the file there.  In that case I usually 
had a file name so I would rename the offending file to filename.bad to keep 
the sector from being unused and then restore the file from backup.  Be very 
careful that you account for sector numbers being offset from partition and 
slice boundaries if you try this method.  And this was probably back in FreeBSD 
4.x or 6.x, so no warranties and YMMV.

-Jed

On May 31, 2011, at 6:20 PM, Soren Kristensen wrote:

 Hi,
 
 Our main server have disk problems, and I need a little help
 
 It's running FreeBSD 7.2, with a GEOM mirror in degraded status, one 
 disk is already dead and the other have 2 hard read errors I have 
 tried fsck several times, but it keep insisting on running fsck, 
 refusing fixing those 2 hard read errors.
 
 I have new disks in the mail, but this is the main soekris server so I 
 need to get it up and running asap.
 
 Any tips on how to get it up and running ? Is it possible to maybe just 
 force the file system clean ?
 
 Please copy to so...@soekris.dk as I currently can't read soekris.com 
 mail, that's via the main server
 
 And yes, I have new disks in the mail And yes, the old disk was 
 enterprise class drives.
 
 
 Best Regards,
 
 
 Soren Kristensen
 
 CEO  Chief Engineer
 Soekris Engineering, Inc.
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Re: [Soekris] Pyamyd login fails

[Jed Clear]

On Apr 20, 2011, at 10:14 AM, l.rine...@movimatica.com wrote:
After i boot Pyramid Metrix Pebble/Linux 0.9 in my Soekris net4801
 from compact flash, the system prompts:
 pyramid login:
 i enter root but the reply is:
 
 pyramid login: root
 Metrix Pebble/Linux 0.9 pyramid ttyS0
 pyramid login: 
 
 and so on, and i am not able to enter in the system.
 
 Can you help me ?

You'll probably get better results asking this in a Pyramid or Linux forum, but 
I'll give it a shot anyway.  Note that I use FreeBSD, but the Unix login 
process is fairly similar.  YMMV.

Something is missing that the login needs to authenticate root and successfully 
start a shell.  Given that it never prompts for the password, I'd check 
/etc/passwd and all it's adjuncts which vary by OS (some use /etc/shadow, 
/etc/master.passwd). Make sure the root entry isn't garbled.   You could also 
be missing the root shell, but I don't think you're getting that far.  Or the 
permissions are wrong on any of these. 

Hmm, maybe even the login executable if it's getty that supplies the prompt.  
Not quite sure of the division of labor there.  If you have Pyramid running on 
something else try man login for clues and take note of the files listed 
toward the end.

Not sure if Linux uses this, but check /etc/ttys and make sure the console line 
is marked secure, otherwise direct root login isn't permitted.

Try booting to single user, or mount the CF on another system, to check all 
this.

Good luck,

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] *BSD vs Linux

[Jed Clear]

On Apr 13, 2011, at 6:06 PM, Ken Hornstein wrote:
  I'm really curious why those that chose BSDs chose them?  
 I'm a BSD user from waaay back; I cut my teeth on SunOS 4 in college, and
 I ran a actual BSD 4.3 system on a derelict VAX 11/750 just for the pure
 hell of it.

I have a similar story to Kens.  It all started when a busy coworker handed me 
some QIC cartridges with SunOS 4.0.1 on them and asked if I wanted to learn 
Unix.  We needed to get a big 9U Sun SPARC VME board working and since I 
couldn't do anything with the VME cards I was designing until it was loaded, I 
got the job.   What was the GUI back then ... oh, yeah, SunView!  But I 
digress.  Anyway SunOS 4 was very BSD, so that's what's seemed right to me ever 
since.

  I was around when 386BSD was forming,

Not much later, when I wanted a Unix for home on a 386 box, I somehow stumbled 
on  Walnut Creek and FreeBSD 2.0 (.7 I think) CDs.   I was also impressed that 
WC ate their own dog food and ran their busy FTP site on FreeBSD.  Pretty much 
a bullet proof network stack from BSD.  Even ATT and Microsoft thought so... 
but I digress again.  This was early '95, or at least it says Jan. '95 on the 
jewel case.  I don't recall if I'd even heard of Lunix back then.

When I built my third tower system, I planned to turn the prior one (486DX/66) 
into a firewall for my new always on DSL line, running OpenBSD because of its 
hard earned security reputation.  But I ran into trouble with the driver for 
one of the used NICs I'd picked up at a computer show.  Even  though Theo 
responded personally to my bug report, I couldn't wait for a fix, so that got 
FreeBSD as well.  When eventually replacing failed parts on that tower became 
less like fun and more like work, I decided on something smaller and quieter, 
which led to a net5501 and the discovery of NanoBSD.  I hadn't known it, but I 
had been installing its build tools for years as it's part of the FreeBSD base 
(thanks Poul).

I can echo Ken's comment about cleaner.  The BSDs are designed as  complete 
OSs.  Each project does their own kernel AND userland (helping themselves to 
the best of the other projects' code, of course, but more on BSD License in a 
moment.  You can compile a very capable OS solely from each projects code base. 
  None of the *BSDs are distros as they aren't distributing outside code in 
the base.  Of course they do include a lot of optional third party software.  
The Ports system is just amazing, but no longer that unique to the BSD camp.  
And if you add the Linux compatibility to the kernel, you can run almost any 
Linux binary as well.  And this all adds up to the control that allows an 
orderly directory hierarchy.  I'll defer to Ken on kernel building being 
cleaner as I haven't built a Linux kernel.

Obviously there is a big difference in the licensing between BSD and GPL.  
Personally it doesn't make much practical difference to me as I don't write a 
whole lot of code, so is outside the scope for my response to the original 
question.  But it does matter to many.  There's a reason that my second 
favorite OS, MacOSX, has a FreeBSD middle.  And of course Microsoft's original 
IP stack for Windows was also BSD code.  

And of course the most important reason for any OS choice, mascots.  Beastie is 
cuter than Tux! 

OK, I've wasted enough of your bandwidth.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] multiport serial card recommendations for a net5501?

[Jed Clear]

On Feb 27, 2011, at 3:31 PM, Alfred Landrum wrote:

 If you have good or bad experiences with a multiport serial card,
 please let me know.  I'd like to find an 8 port serial card to use
 with a net5501 in order to create a linux-based serial access terminal
 server.  I've found several vendors online, but not all specify
 whether they will support 3.3v.
 
 I saw the 1u soekris solution on the antenna-factory.com website uses
 a sunix ser5066a, but my search attempts didn't locate anyone selling
 that card in the US.

This seems to meet your specifications

http://www.cooldrives.com/8sepcilowprc.html

It has the same 16C950 UART emulation as the Sunix, claims 3.3V support and has 
a FL vendor.  

Note: I'm not vouching one way or another for the maker or vendor since I don't 
have any experience with either, just pointing it out.  On the other hand, if 
you can't even get a serial port card design right, you're not going to be in 
the hardware business long.  Anyway caveat emptor.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] net5501 bricked, need insight on what happened

[Jed Clear]

My recollection is that the error LED for for a few seconds during cold boot is 
normal. If it stays on you have an issue.  

My first thought is that you have a speed mismatch on the serial line.  Perhaps 
it didn't stay the same speed after the reboot, or you restarted the terminal 
emulation and it defaulted back to 9600.   That's one reason I always go into 
CommBIOS first thing and set it to 9600, which is the default for the rest of 
the world.  Many less problems that way.

After that, power supplies are a frequent issue, as the other poster mentioned. 
I'm on my third.  Soekris replaced the first one under warranty and when it 
went, I bought something completely different.

If you boot off the CF or HDD can you ping it on the network?  Does the HDD 
even act like it's booting?

-Jed

On Feb 18, 2011, at 11:37 AM, Andrea Gronchi agron...@smrobotica.it wrote:

 Hi,
 I've been experimenting with a net5501 board for some days.
 
 The board run Linux (2.6.36) and worked quite nicely botting from PXE+NFS and 
 CF.
 This same board also spent some time running as a test firewall appliance, 
 without apparent problems.
 
 After a clean hard reboot (correct system shutdown followed by power supply 
 disconnection), the board stopped working:
 - no POST with CF inserted,
 - no POST with SATA drive connected.
 - no POST even with a clean, unconnected board.
 
 Other than the power led on, the only recognizable sign of activity is the 
 error led, which happens to stay on for the first 6-8 seconds after 
 powering on.
 
 I'd like to have some insight in this specific condition, possible fixes and 
 what is causing this.
 
 Thank you in advance.
 
 Andrea.
 
 
   Andrea Gronchi
   agron...@smrobotica.it
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Re: [Soekris] 4G CF errors

[Jed Clear]

On Jan 25, 2011, at 9:41 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
Mike Tancsa wrote:
 ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51READY,DSC,ERROR
 error=10NID_NOT_FOUND LBA=7813103
 
 # ls -l _.disk.full
 -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  - 972776448 Jan 10 17:11 _.disk.full
 
 dd if=_.disk.full ibs=64k obs=64k of=/dev/da0
 
 NANO_MEDIASIZE=190
 
 I'm not familiar with NanoBSD, but does this mean it's a 190 x 512 
 byte image? Do you know why the kernel would be trying to read from 
 sector 7813103 if the image is only 190 sectors?

The comment in the actual nanobsd.sh script says NANO_MEDIASIZE is a count of 
512 byte sectors.  Note that is the size used to create the _.disk.full file 
which actually contains three BSD partitions on three different BSD slices (aka 
DOS partitions), a small partition to write config changes to and then the rest 
divided into half so you can ping pong between two versions of the OS by 
loading just the _.disk.image file using one of the update# scripts.  

So the current value leaves a lot of uninitialized sectors at the end of the CF 
after the dd, which probably aren't accounted for in the DOS partition table.  
Also I think certain parts of the GEOM driver check the last sector of a drive 
for configuration info?  Maybe you need to change MEDIASIZE to match the device 
so those bits of the CF are properly initialized by the dd.

At least in 8.1 you can add the line FlashDevice sandisk 4G to your 
nanobsd.conf file and omit the NANO_MEDIASIZE value.  You might want to try 
that first.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] FreeBSD 8.1: kernel config (kernel: stray irq7)

[Jed Clear]

Another net5501 data point:
cl...@net5501:~ vmstat -i
interrupt  total   rate
irq0: clk 1024103514   1000
irq3: uart1 25936365 25
irq4: uart0  579  0
irq5: vr16171126  6
irq8: rtc  131068465127
irq11: vr0   6262568  6
irq14: ata0 1761  0
irq15: ata1 ohci0+ 1  0
Total 1193544379   1165

With almost 12 days of uptime on 8.1R-p2, nanoBSD build on a 1GB CF card.  
There is a Garmin18 GPS hanging on uart1 sending 1 message per second and a DCD 
interrupt from the 1PPS line

I recall those stray irq7s from before, but apparently they are gone on my 
system.  

-Jed

On Dec 15, 2010, at 4:39 AM, Martin Johnson wrote:

 On 08/12/2010 19:30, Martin Johnson wrote:
 
 After updating from 7.1 to 8.1, I'm seeing kernel: stray irq7 kernel
 messages in the syslogs on three NET5501's.
 ...
 The box is a NET5501-70 with a SATA laptop drive, and no extra cards.
 So I start to think there's something in my kernel config that doesn't
 suit the 5501 hardware.
 
 I have now trimmed down my kernel config for FreeBSD 8.1.  If anyone
 wants it, it can be downloaded from http://net42.co.uk/downloads/NET5501
 
 Everything seems to work, but top is still reporting up to 10% of CPU
 time being taken by interrupts, even when the system is idle:
 
 CPU:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  1.9% system,  9.3% interrupt, 88.7% idle
 
 After each boot, the log shows kernel: stray irq7 and later kernel:
 too many stray irq 7's: not logging anymore, as if there's something on
 the Soekris board generating IRQs that we aren't handling.
 
 I believe IRQ 7 on FreeBSD kernel reports is a placeholder for missed
 interrupts.   Just looking at interrupt counters:
 
 # vmstat -i
 interrupt  total   rate
 irq0: clk  158121051   1000
 irq3: uart1 2221  0
 irq4: uart0  375  0
 irq7:  6  0
 stray irq7 6  0
 irq8: rtc  161876641   1023
 irq11: vr0680731  4
 irq14: ata0   436168  2
 irq15: ata1 ohci0+  94943420600
 Total  416060619   2631
 
 Could the stats for irq0  irq8 reflect a clock that's ticking a bit too
 quickly for a relatively slow CPU?
 
 I don't have anything on ATA1 (just a SATA laptop hard drive on
 /dev/ad0).  But I do have a USB multi-port RS232 device, though as far
 as I know it's not hit very hard: it just plugs into various device
 consoles, plus a weather receiver that receives brief bursts of traffic
 at 19200 baud every 20 seconds or so.
 
 If I run vmstat -i on a different NET5501 (without the USB device), then
 I get:
 
 # vmstat -i
 interrupt  total   rate
 irq0: clk  572865511999
 irq3: uart1 4559  0
 irq4: uart0  334  0
 irq8: rtc   73317680127
 irq11: vr0443655  0
 irq14: ata0   617127  1
 irq15: ata1 ohci0+ 1  0
 Total  647248867   1129
 
 Once again the clock rate seems a bit high, but the rate for IRQ15 is
 zero, presumably because there are no USB devices on that machine.
 
 Is CPU_ELAN_XTAL required on the NET5501, or was that only for NET4801
 hardware?
 
 Thanks for any pointers,
 
 - Martin.
 
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Re: [Soekris] serial-only boot of x86 Solaris 11 Express?

[Jed Clear]

My not terribly recent experience with Solaris on SPARC was that if there was 
no Sun keyboard installed, it would automagically use TTYA as the console.  
Which brings to mind a question, what speed do you have your terminal set for?  
If it's set to the net5501's default 19200, you might just need to set 
everything (BIOS and terminal) to 9600 to catch Solaris booting.  I wouldn't 
bet on it being that simple, but certainly worth a try.

-Jed

On Dec 2, 2010, at 8:53 PM, Malcolm Herbert wrote:

 I'm trying to install Solaris 11 Express on a Soekris net5501 host which
 has 256MB of memory and no video card for use as a low-power server[1] -
 how do I configure grub to tell the kernel to use the serial port as a
 console?
 
 after some hardware issues, I managed to get a 32bit install of Solaris
 11 Express installed onto a 2.5 SATA drive using my netbook.  After
 making sure that grub didn't use a graphical splash screen I was able to
 hook the HDD up to the net5501 board and boot it.  
 
 The serial console showed the grub screen and was I able to watch it
 count down, however when grub handed off to the kernel, there was some
 disk activity (around 20-25sec worth) before the host rebooted again ...
 all the while without any output to the BIOS video emulator or to the
 serial port ...
 
 This is encouraging - I'm expecting the host to not perform well (if it
 does at all) due to the extremely tight memory, but I'd still like to
 see where it is choking and see what else the booting kernel discovers
 as it comes up, however I'm not sure what to do with grub to get the
 appropriate logging messages to the kernel ... has anyone tried to get a
 purely serial-only install of Solaris/OpenSolaris working on x86
 hardware?  No brainer for SPARC, which is where I'm more familiar ... 
 
 Regards,
 Malcolm
 
 [1] the host I am intending on using does have the minimum required
 512MB but it's in use at the moment
 
 -- 
 Malcolm HerbertThis brain intentionally
 m...@mjch.netleft blank
 
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[Soekris] ipfw+natd changes in FreeBSD 8.1

[Jed Clear]

Another gratuitous lesson learned from upgrading my net5501 from FreeBSD 8.0R 
to 8.1R.  May it save others who follow.  -Jed

If you're using natd with ipfw in FreeBSD 8.0 or earlier and upgrade to FreeBSD 
8.1, you may need to modify your ipfw divert rules slightly.

The following works up through 8.0, but will fail with no indications in 8.1:
 add 300 divert natd ip from any to any in via vr1
 add 6 divert natd ip from any to any out via vr1

You need to change the ip to ip4 in divert rules.  For example:
 add 300 divert natd ip4 from any to any in via vr1
 add 6 divert natd ip4 from any to any out via vr1
And since ip and any are supposedly synonyms, I'd guess you'd need to 
change any in a divert rule to ip4 as well.

I saw no explanation on why this is needed.  My guess is natd is choking on 
non-IPv4 packets now, where it ignored them in the past.

Note, I use the cpp preprocessor on my ipfw rules, so your syntax might be 
slightly different.

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Re: [Soekris] how to xfer an OS/install from a VirtualBoxVM to a running Soekris, over the network?

[Jed Clear]

On Aug 13, 2010, at 12:42 PM, Ben DJ wrote:

 On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Martin Johnson
 martin.johnson.uk.li...@googlemail.com wrote:
 Assuming that the image you've made really is bootable on the Soekris,
 
 If it's booting in the VM, any particular reason it might not on the Soekris?
 
 I would PXEBOOT the Soekris box from a Voyage Linux LiveCD on a laptop
 over an Ethernet cable, then use 'dd' in Voyage Linux to pull the image
 from the network (or copy from a USB stick) onto the Soekris HDD.
 
 The advantage of Voyage Linux is that it's a LiveCD that you can use to
 provide the PXEBOOT environment using just an old laptop and an Ethernet
 cable.  So there's nothing to configure, and no changes to your normal
 network.
 
 Didn't know abt Voyage Linux.  Since I've already got a VM running
 FreeBSD, what's the specific advantage of Voyage over that?  I fear
 I'm missing your point.

I infer that the Voyage Live CD has a PXE boot server already configured and 
running.  Being a FreeBSD person myself, I'm pretty sure FreeBSD does not have 
such a server configured by default.  You'd probably have to find the port, 
install and configure it.

If you've got a CF card around, you could copy your image to CF, boot the 4801 
from CF, use that to dd the image to the HDD.  Or if your image uses swap, 
build a basic NanoBSD image for the CF.  You could even keep the CF installed 
as a backup to the HDD.

-Jed


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Re: [Soekris] net5501 and PCI card limitations

[Jed Clear]

On Jul 6, 2010, at 8:34 PM, Nick Lidakis wrote:
 As there is no manual for the net5501 on the Soekris site I thought I'd ask
 here.
 
 Are there any limitations to what kind of PCI card one can use with the
 net5501? In building an appliance like music server, I'd like to experiment 
 with several different PCI sound cards. Some require +12v and -12v voltages,
 as the cards offer analog out and S/PDIF.

Often the 4801 manual is referenced for the 5501.  It lists a maximum of 0.3A 
for +12V and 0.1A for -12V on the PCI connector.  There is also a 10W combined 
limit on the 3.3V and 5V PCI pins, shared with any hard disk.

 Any gotchas?

Many, like the above is for the 4801 and may or may not be the same for the 
5501.  It also depends heavily on the size of the supply you use to power the 
5501 itself.   See the notes with the various supplies that Soekris offers. 

One thing that is certain is that you will need a card compatible with 3.3V PCI 
signaling.  If that doesn't curtail your interest, your best bet is to search 
this list's archives and the wiki (http://wiki.soekris.info/) for an answer.  
You might find the answer in discussions of telephony cards that come up 
occasionally.  Or wait a while to see if somebody more useful responds.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] Net-booting Debian 5?

[Jed Clear]

[Resend to list]
On Tue Mar  2 15:18 , Steven Finnegan  sent:
I have been attempting to net-boot Debian 5 on either a 5501 or a 4801. I have
the pxe environment set up. I have been following instructions here:
http://wiki.soekris.info/Installing_Debian_Linux_5.0 including the editing of 
the
configuration files.

Are you sure you did the 5. Modify the netboot files a little to work with a
serial console. Debian used to come with this but it's gone now. step?  
Completely?

When booting the environment, I get to the point of getting the PXELINUX
copyright notice, then everything halts. Any help would be appreciated. Screen
capture of boot sequence follows...
[snip]

debian-installer/i386/boot-screens/vesamenu.c32-- Block #1 is read 4 
times w/o
acknowledgement, no further net accesses

That you hang up in the _VESA_ menu is what makes me think something isn't
completely configured for a serial console.  If not the netboot bits, then later
on in the boot sequence.

Disclaimer: But that's pretty much a hunch on my part.  I use FreeBSD myself and
haven't booted a diskless client in a long while, and that was a sun4m and
Solaris 5.8, IIRC.

HTH,

-Jed





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Re: [Soekris] Seagate Barracuda 750G SATA not working on net5501

[Jed Clear]

On Sun Feb 28  9:00 , Henrik /KaarPoSoft  sent:


 Dear all,

 I have a net5501, which seems to work with a Kingston 64GB SSDnowV+ 
 (SATA) and Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 (3.5 160GB) SATA.
 However, I can not get it to work with my Seagate Barracuda ES SATA 
 3.0Gb/s 750-GB Hard Drive (ST3750640NS).

 The 750G Barracuda has worked fine for a year in my Dell PowerEdge T105, 
 and I put FreeBSD 8.0 on it using my Dell OptiPlex 8400, where it also 
 works fine.

 However, when I put the 750G Barracuda in the net5501, it does not get 
 past POST.
 Most of the time I get to
 POST 0123456789bcefgh
 sometimes to
 POST 0123456789bcefghip
 and sometimes it even starts to check memory, but does not get past the
  Mbyte

 Once it acutally got past POST and into the ComBIOS, but the drive still 
 not visible.
 

 This, to me, suggests a power issue.  When my Soekris supplied wall warts 
 started
 to go, I'd get behavior like that on my 5501 with just a CF card.  Assuming
 you're powering the drive through the Soekris and it draws more power than 
 the
 other two drives, it could be you're over taxing the power supply.  You 
 could try
 an experiment and try to find a way to power the drive externally.

   
Hi Jed,

Thanks for the suggestion!

I am an absolute newbee on embedded and power issues ))-:

According to the specs the SSD will draw 3.5 -4.2 Watts on operation.
The Barracuda 7200.7 160Gb (which works) draws 12 Watts average on 
operation according to spec.
The Barracuda ES 750Gb (which does not work) draws 13 Watts average on 
operation according to spec.
However, according to specs both the Barracudas draw up to 2.8 amps on 
12V, i.e. a mighty 33.6 Watts on spinup.
So I guess the problem could be that the voltage is dropping during spinup.

Everything is powered through a 12V, 1.5A C8 power supply (supplied by 
Cortex); i.e. 18 Watts.

I have searched the Soekris specs, but I cannot figure out how much 
power the net5501 itself needs, neither how much power it can supply to 
the SATA disk.

I think this was discussed on the list a little while ago.  Maybe it got 
captured
on the wiki, but it should be in the list archives.  And that may have been one
of those times Soren made a definitive statement.

Would it make sense to purchase another external power supply (e.g. 12V, 
3A), or does the Soekris net5501 internally limit the possible power to 
the SATA disk, now matter what the external power supply can deliver?

I'd think that would be the next thing to try, assuming someone else doesn't 
come
up with a definitive alternative solution.  Obviously there are practical limits
to the current going through the net5501, e.g. I'd think 200A might tend to
convert circuit traces into blown fuses.  And the net5501 web page does mention 
a
20W limit on the external DC input to the 5501.

(I don't think I want to experiment with powering the drive externally)

You could use the PC you built it on as a power supply, being careful with
grounding.  Borrowing an external disk enclosure would be better if that's an 
option.

HTH,

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] Installing FreeBSD 8.0 on Soekris net5501

[Jed Clear]

[reply on list this time]

This will cover the serial console issues, including where to put the -h:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/serialconsole-setup.html

-Jed

On Wed Feb 24 22:39 , Jed Clear jcl...@speakeasy.net sent:

On Wed Feb 24 16:47 , Henrik /KaarPoSoft hen...@kaarposoft.dk sent:
Henrik /KaarPoSoft wrote:
 Scott Newell wrote:
 At 03:24 PM 2/24/2010 , Henrik /KaarPoSoft wrote:
 Dear all,

 I have just purchased a Soekris net5501 and tried to install FreeBSD 
 8.0 on it.
 However, I cannot get it to work, and I am hoping for your kind 
 suggestions.

 Try booting with ACPI disabled? It was one of the many things that 
 gave me
 fits when I tried to get 8.0 running on a '4521.

 I am not quite sure how to do that.

 Yes, in a normal FreeBSD boot I get the option,
 but here I just get a garbled terminal screen...

OK, the garbled output sounds like one or several issues.  

As a previous poster said, the path of least resistance is to change the 
Soekris
default BIOS 19200 console speed to 9600 (and your terminal emulator) as 
FreeBSD
uses that speed in at least two different stages of the boot.  

Second is that you need to have a -h in some boot options file to use a 
serial
console.  I forget the exact file, but google should turn it up for you. 
Something in /boot/.  

Another issue is that a normal FreeBSD boot puts up a semi-graphic menu during
the boot to choose among various options.  I believe when you build the NanoBSD
variant that the no beastie customization eliminates this.  

Lastly, you could have a problem with /etc/fstab.  The device names in there
probably reflect the device naming on your SERVER and must be changed to 
reflect
the device naming on the Soekris box or your boot will fail when it attempts to
mount the filesystems.  This could result in no changes to any files on the 
disk
as you're seeing.

Have you considered using a CF card instead of a disk?  The NanoBSD build of
FreeBSD works rather well and you can add as much of the full FreeBSD
functionality as you want and will fit on you CF card.  If you don't have a lot
of dynamic data, this is a better way to go.  This is how I use my 5501.  No
moving parts and less heat.  Or you could use NanoBSD and the CF card for the 
OS
and Apps, and the HDD for just your dynamic data.

HTH,

-Jed



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Re: [Soekris] Debian install on 4801, eth0 won't work.

[Jed Clear]

On Tue Feb 23 12:59 , der Mouse  sent:
 Not real sure that X would do a lot of good on a 4801 box

I don't see why not.  It was useful on Sun-3s, which were significantly
wimpier.

Perhaps you're confusing X with insanely bloated modern desktop
environments built atop X, like KDE and Gnome?  (X is not a window
system; it's a framework for building window systems.  It's possible to
build fairly lightweight window systems in X.)

I don't think the X _server_ software would be of much use on a Seokris box, not
because of horsepower, but because of lack of KVM.  No reason you couldn't run X
client software (e.g. xterm) though.  Although it seems like HTTP[S] based
interfaces are much more common these days.

-Jed


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Re: [Soekris] Writing a BIOS config from cmd line

[Jed Clear]

Have you considered simply set bootdrive=F0 80 and then just control the boot 
from the boot server?  You'd just need some way for the boot server to 
selectively 
ignore boot requests from the soekris box when you want the soekris to boot 
from 
its own drive.  But since that server is presumably running an OS all the time, 
it 
seems like a much simpler problem.

If a given boot server only supports a single soekris, this could be as simple 
as 
disabling the boot service entirely.  If multiple soekris are supported you 
might 
do something with ACLs (e.g. firewall rules).  On an old Sun server, I'd be 
editing /etc/ethers to do this.

Another thought was that in ye olden days (i.e. before the Internet was so 
ubiquitous) we'd be sticking a modem on the console port.  Obviously modems and 
phone lines aren't free, but it does give you complete remote console access.

Note that these ideas were inspired by a few pints of Square One's Hop Fest, 
with 
the added distraction of the Phillies working hard to clinch the NL tonight, so 
YMMV.

-Jed

On Tue Oct 20 22:23 , Erik M. Cummings  sent:

I agree with the logic structures being a pain.  This is how the  
current lab implementation is built (bash + expect) as a proof of  
concept, however, I cannot ADD another system to each one of these in  
the field because I need to change the boot order sometimes.

I will need to get the package working from a linux shell-- or use  
alternative system boards.  Right now the process of using flashrom to  
save and restore two different snapshots of the BIOS seems most  
promising.

Erik

On Oct 20, 2009, at 7:03 PM, The Fungi wrote:

 On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 08:45:57PM -0500, chad brabec wrote:
 [...]
 the lanuage is based off of tcl and you can get it with tk also.
 [...]

 Though logic and syntax in TCL are a pain, so I personally recommend
 a pure Python module which reimplments the interaction pieces
 allowing you to do the rest in a (granted, my opinion) much more
 pleasant language:

 http://pexpect.sourceforge.net/pexpect.html

 I've used it recently on a number of projects where I previously
 would have employed traditional expect instead, and been quite happy
 with the results.
 -- 
 { IRL(Jeremy_Stanley); PGP(9E8DFF2E4F5995F8FEADDC5829ABF7441FB84657);
 SMTP(fu...@yuggoth.org); IRC(fu...@irc.yuggoth.org#ccl);  
 ICQ(114362511);
 AIM(dreadazathoth); YAHOO(crawlingchaoslabs);  
 FINGER(fu...@yuggoth.org);
 MUD(fu...@katarsis.mudpy.org:6669); WWW(http://fungi.yuggoth.org/); }
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Re: [Soekris] Installing NetBSD-5.0.1 on net5501

[Jed Clear]

On Tue Sep 22 17:50 , Manh Do  sent:
Hello 
I'm trying to 
install the official NetBSD-5.0.1 by using the official GENERIC kernel config 
file but then I ran into the following error message at bootup 
time:
 
   
warning: no /dev/console
   panic: 
[snip]
Any ideas on how to 
fix this problem?

At a wild guess (from a FreeBSD user), you need to figure out how tell NetBSD 
to use the serial port as a 
console since most x86 OS assume a KVM style console.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] Fail to boot with equipment connected to serial port

[Jed Clear]

On Mon Jun  1 18:51 , Asle Festø  sent:
Hello, I'm a newbie trying to learn about these fascinating little 
devices. Sorry if my question is to easy but I haven't found the answer 
just yet.

I have a Soekris Net4801 that I want to use for data logging. I have 
installed Debian on it and want to use it to read data from a 1-Wire 
network. This is done by the serial port. I do however have trouble 
booting with the 1-wire device attached to my box. It boots just fine 
without anything connected at all but if I connect the cable from my 
1-wire device it fails to boot. I don't know if it's the BIOS or 
Debian/Grub that needs to be tweaked.

You might find it easier to connect your one wire network to the second serial
port.  This avoids all the potential console difficulties, which would likely
reoccur every time you upgrade the OS.  This option also leaves your console 
port
free for the inevitable debugging.

The second serial port is on a 10 pin header on the board.  Check the manual and
wiki for more information.

-Jed

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Re: [Soekris] Net5501 and Crux

[Jed Clear]

On Sun Apr 12 21:57 , 'TechKid PC' tho...@techkidpc.com sent:

From: Christopher R. Hertel c...@ubiqx.mn.org
 That's why it's called comBIOS.  The Soekris BIOS sends its output to 
 the
 serial port.

Ah thanks that explains it. That was the only way I assumed would prove 
useful for trouble shooting any boot errors but all the documentation I have 
found online did not mention it operated in that manner.

Last question I hope: Do you have any links that explains how to initiate a 
connection to the combios from another computer? I assume I use telnet or 
hyper terminal? What options should be used? 

http://wiki.soekris.info/Connecting_to_the_serial_console

HTH,

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] impossible to link eth1, eth2,

[Jed Clear]

On Fri Dec  5 20:25 , David Alexander  sent:
Several people here assume you want a bridge to tie all your
interfaces together.  You can go to the trouble of doing that, but
why?  The NET5501 is the first Soekris box that can actually saturate
the 100Mbit link.  With that in mind I had high hopes that bonding
several nics together might make up for the fact that I was moving my
server from a Gbit capable box to the Soekris.  Alas, bonding the nics
didn't provide any real throughput improvements, at least not
according to my primitive tests.  The 5501 can really only saturate a
single link at a time.  If someone else thinks otherwise I'm all ears.

First do you understand the difference between bridging and aggregation?  If you
were trying to bridge multiple interfaces together to the same switch, or
interconnected switches, spanning tree should put all but one into a blocked
state, so you get no bandwidth increase, just a slow fail over path.

Now if you set up a link aggregation (sometimes called by the ambiguous term
trunking), you can increase your bandwidth in general use.  However you have 
to
be aware of how the hashing algorithm is set up that picks which link to use for
any given packet.  Often it hashes on the IP address pair.  This is done
intentionally to put any given flow on the same link to lower the probability of
out of order packet delivery.  But it also means that if you only test an
aggregate with one pair of boxes, you're again only using one link.  Some
switches and devices support round robin, which should boost your bandwidth, but
you risk out of order packet arrival.

And after all that, I have no idea if the 5501 could saturate more than one 
link,
just that under those circumstances it won't even try.

-Jed

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Re: [Soekris] FreeBSD on Geode

[Jed Clear]

On Wed Nov 19 16:47 , PatrickLamaizière  sent:
Le Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:26:43 +0100,
Matthias Luft [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit :

 And this is exactly what I'm planning to do: building a small
 homeserver on a Geode LX.
 So my main concern is about the performance: Could anyone tell me the,
 how much throughtput on a 100Mbit network via scp is possible? This
 would be a great clue for me!

With FreeBSD Current on my net5501:
Around 3.0 MB/s, with a patch upon openssl to make it uses the AES
engine of the geode : 5.5 MB/s

I can confirm 3.2 MByte/sec scping a 3.3MB kernel file of a CF card.  No 
patches,
just a NanoBSD build with a custom minimized kernel.  If I read 100MB out of
/dev/zero with ssh, it goes down to 2.9.

-Jed

net5501# uname -a
FreeBSD net5501 6.3-RELEASE-p4 FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE-p4 #0: Mon Sep 29 21:05:32 
EDT
2008 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/obj/nanobsd.custom/usr/src/sys/FOO  i386

macmini2:~ foo$ scp [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/boot/kernel/kernel /dev/null
Password:
kernel100% 3277KB   3.2MB/s   00:01
macmini2:~ foo$ ssh -l foo net5501 dd if=/dev/zero count=102400 bs=1024  
/dev/null
Password:
102400+0 records in
102400+0 records out
104857600 bytes transferred in 35.934339 secs (2918033 bytes/sec)
macmini2:~ foo$ 




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Re: [Soekris] +5V power on Net4501

[Jed Clear]

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008, Marc Balmer wrote:
 * Chris Babcock wrote:
  Can those LVC units be used for as a GPS reference time source for NTP?
 Yes.  They output NMEA sentences, are fully (and easily) configurable
 and provide a PPS signal (which has to be turned on by sending the
 unit some commands).

I have one doing that very job with a 5501.  I use the $GPRMC sentence and
turned of the rest.  ISTR that was the sentnece recommended by the ntp.org
s/w.

If you'd rather not mess around with getting power from pin 10, and aren't
otherwise using your USB connector, it is a +5V source, with enough
hampsters for the LVC, at least with no internal HDD.  Cutting up a spare
USB cable is probably the easiest way to get connected there.  This also
lets you use a standard 2x5 to DE-9 cable for COM2:.  Of course if you're
putting a 2x5 header on the LVC cable anyway, never mind.

If you haven't purchased the GPS 18 LVC yet, I seem to recall you could
get it with two different length cables.  I have 5m and I think the other
option was 3m.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] +5V power on Net4501

[Jed Clear]

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008, Jed Clear wrote:
 If you'd rather not mess around with getting power from pin 10, and aren't
 otherwise using your USB connector, it is a +5V source, with enough
 hampsters for the LVC, at least with no internal HDD.  Cutting up a spare
 USB cable is probably the easiest way to get connected there.  This also
 lets you use a standard 2x5 to DE-9 cable for COM2:.  Of course if you're
 putting a 2x5 header on the LVC cable anyway, never mind.

Forgot to add that I put DE-9 and USB connectors on my GPS 18 so I could
move it between different PCs.  Moving it around is necessary since Garmin
updates firmware via MSWindows and my Soekris is MS free.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] Squashed versions of FreeBSD

[Jed Clear]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2008, Brett Glass wrote:
 Several years ago, I developed several embedded systems using
 PicoBSD, a squashed version of FreeBSD. I then was diverted
 from embedded UNIX development for a few years and am finally
 returning to it. I need to upgrade/revamp some of my older work and
 then develop some new things. I'd like to use a derivative of
 FreeBSD 7.0 (or the upcoming 7.1), and need to come up to speed on
 the various existing schemes for reducing FreeBSD 7.x to manageable
 size and putting it on a CF card. All of the systems I'll be
 developing will need to be configured remotely, and I may need to
 do remote firmware updates, so I'm especially interested in schemes
 which accommodate these things. I expect to build the systems
 around Soekris boards, PC-compatible set top boxes, or similar hardware.

 So far, I've seen two possibilities: miniBSD and a nanoBSD. Are
 there others of which I should be aware? What are their pros and
 cons? How does each of them handle issues involving
 nonvolatile/read-only media vs. read/write media? Are good howtos
 and architecture papers available for them, so that I do not have
 to reverse engineer them to fully understand how they work? Any
 input would be MUCH appreciated.

I'm using nanoBSD on a 5501-70 and it works fine.  I am using FreeBSD 6.3
as the base, though.  And I didn't find any problems finding pointers on
how to get it running.  Probably the biggest problem I see with is that
you have to roll your own to add non-base ports or packages.  Not that
it's hard to do, but it seems like a prime candidate to add to the stock
nanoBSD build process.

I did have the luxury of writiing the CF card on my build server the first
time, but you should be able to leverage the PXEboot if you need to load
the CF card with the 5501 the first time.  nanoBSD is designed to only use
half your CF at a time, allowing subsequent updated images to be loaded in
the other half and then boot over when complete.

This will get you rolling:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/nanobsd/howto.html

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] asking about voltage and temperature monitoring soekris net 4801

[Jed Clear]

On Fri, 23 May 2008, Wilkinson, Alex wrote:

 0n Thu, May 22, 2008 at 06:41:06PM +0800, komang adi wrote:

 yes, i have seen that before. But, i'm using ubuntu for the OS. The 
 program
 at  http://phk/soekris/env4801/ using free besd. Can i just apply it for 
 the
 ubuntu? Thanks

 Poul, the aforementioned URL redirects to http://www.searchfusion.com/

I suspect this is what he war referring to:

http://phk.freebsd.dk/soekris/env4801/

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] Want to build a router

[Jed Clear]

On Thu, 22 May 2008, jmc wrote:

 --- Stephen Brown [Thu, May 22, 2008 at 07:46:24PM -0400]: ---
  Well I'm looking to get away from my old PC and jump into an embedded
  platform because I think it will be challenging, fun and educational
  while fullfilling a need at the same time, and I already have a
  dedicated switch so the 4 port card wouldn't help me.

 amen, brother. all about the hack.

For me it turned out to be all about the quiet.  I got the 5501 to replace
an ailing 486/66 tower as my home firewall.  I planning to repair the 486
and use it for something else, even purchased the parts, but it is so much
quieter in here with it off that I may never get to it.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] openbsd install problem

[Jed Clear]

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Kjetil wrote:
  I am trying to install openbsd but I keep getting an error message,
  booting tftp:/bsd: open tftp:/bsd: Unknown error: code 60
   failed(60). will try /obsd
[snip]
 Try add these two options to your dhcpd.conf (i assume your tftp server is
 the same as your dhcp server).

 next-server 10.0.0.100;
 option root-path /bsd;

Some [not so] obvious things to check:
  Is /bsd and all relevant contents world readable?
  Did you restart inetd after uncommenting tftpd in /etc/inetd.conf?
  Did you set up the tcpd wrapper properly?
  From the linux box can you do manual tftp?
tftp localhost
get bsd.rd

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] net4801 + openbsd + serial device

[Jed Clear]

On Sun, 27 Apr 2008, Uffe Jakobsen wrote:
  The part of the graphing script communicating with the device is this:
 
  printf \x11\x00\x00\x00\xB6\x00\x00\x00\xC7  /dev/tty
  dd if=/dev/tty of=/root/tmp/output bs=1 count=31 
 
  The result I get:

 Looking at the script part that you've provided in your email and looking at 
 the supplied output
 I would say that you use the wrong tty device.

 The output that was supposed to go to the solar-device is output to your own 
 terminal.
 Now I'm not that familiar with OpenBSD but /dev/tty is usualy the system 
 concole device on most unix'es

 On Solaris/BSD's serial-devices/-ports are usually called something like 
 /dev/cua?? /dev/ttyd?

 But maybe someone on this list that know OpenBSD better that I can help you 
 with that actual device naming for serial devices on OpenBSD ?

In FreeBSD, /dev/tty is what ever tty you're presently logged in on, won't
even be a serial port at all if you're SSH'd in.  You need something like
/dev/ttyd0 (FreeBSD) to specify the first serial port.

You probably also need to get OpenBSD to take the getty off that serial
port.  Not sure how far OpenBSD has diverged from FreeBSD, but in FreeBSD
you'd edit /etc/ttys and find the line with ttyd0 and change the keyword
on to off, save, then kill -1 1.  One thing concerns me is that I've
never run a Unix with no console device enabled, even if it was just an
unconnected serial port.

Another alternative is that there is a second serial port on the 4801.
You just need to bring it out to a DB9.  Beware there are two different
2x5 to DB9 wirings, beyond the usual DCE/DTE problems, and the
nomenclature is horribly inconsistent.  I went through all that to hook up
my GPS18, getting the wrong cable the first try.  I updated the Soekris
wiki on this, so check there to avoid my mistakes. ;-)

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] SATA cables on a net5501: where to hide them

[Jed Clear]

On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, jmc wrote:
 --- Wim Vandeputte - Mailinglists only [Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 08:32:40PM 
 +0200]: ---
  On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 12:18:35PM -0400, jmc wrote:

 my only remaining concern is that i'm afraid i have too tight a bend
 radius to keep the cable away from the PATA connectors which might
 rough up or even puncture the cable itself. but then again, this isn't
 going in a tank or off-road vehicle---i figure it should be OK, but i
 try to always be cognizant of bend radiuses with cables that carry data.

If you're worried about the PATA pins I have a suggestion.  Cut or remove
the ribbon cable from the connector of a PATA cable and install just a
connector on the pins.  If you've been building PCs for a while, you
probably have a few laying about in junk drawers.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] net4826 lockup issue and BIOS release

[Jed Clear]

On Fri, 18 Apr 2008, Izumi Utakoji wrote:
 Looking into ComBIOS changelog, we are considering to upgrade the BIOS,
 but want to make sure we can apply b4801_133.bin to net4826. I assume
 that net4801 bios can be applied to net4826, since it sais for
 net48xx, but want confirmation.

Would also be useful if they updated the download page section title to
...for net48xx series.

 Also, since I am a new comer here, allow me for the basic question, but
 how do you do search through the archive at Soekris site???

Use Google with a search string like:
   4826 update bios site:lists.soekris.com

You can also browse the archive here:
http://lists.soekris.com/pipermail/soekris-tech/

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] CF often not detected by 5501-70 ComBIOS 1.33

[Jed Clear]

On Sun, 13 Apr 2008, John Stalker wrote:

 I am experiencing problems with intermittent detection of my CF card
 on a new 5501-70 with the latest version of the ComBIOS.  The card is
 a new Silicon Systems SiliconDrive Compact Flash card 2 GB Industrial
 Grade card, so it's not an old or a junky card.
No sol'n, but some ideas for further data points:

Both being new could be a bad thing.  If you have any veteran hardware
available, try testing with that.  For instance, does another 2GB CF card
boot reliably in the new 5501?  Does the CF card in question work well
with another reader, preferably another Soekris?

When you PXE boot, is the CF card visible to the OS?  If so, try to fsck
it, or run an md5 on the device, to give it a good thrashing.  Lather,
rinse, repeat.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] ethernet problem

[Jed Clear]

On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, [UTF-8] Lars Noodén wrote:

 Michael Greenish wrote:

  Any one seen this before with their Soerkis box?  Any suggestions?

 Not that specifically.  I have seen with a 4801 that some subnets I have
 to work with will not let me use a normal cross-over Ethernet cable with
 the Soekris unit.  But those particular wall plugs do work with a
 straight-through (usually they're orange) cable as well as with a
 cross-over if I connect first to a hub and then to the 4801.

That was my first thought also on reading the original post.

The 4501 appears to be MDI only and likely the Linux box is as well while
the router is either auto MDI or MDI-X.  That would be consistent with the
described symptoms, in that both work with the router and not with each
other.  Try an Ethernet crossover cable between the 4501 and Linux box or
a hub and straight cables.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] FreeBSD 7.0 on a net4801?

[Jed Clear]

On Sat, 1 Mar 2008, Jan Hoevers wrote:
 Graham Menhennitt wrote on 1-3-2008 7:56:
  Paul Hoffman wrote:
  Greetings again. I'm trying to install FreeBSD 7.0 on a net4801 with
  no luck. After the (unreadable over serial) boot prompt, during the
  10-second countdown, I hit return. The cursor goes almost to the left
  end of the screen and stops. It doesn't respond to typing.
  Eventually, the system reboots.
  I had no problem installing a pre-release version of 7.0 a few months ago. 
  Why is the serial output unreadable? The Soekris BIOS talks at 9600 baud 
  and FreeBSD defaults to 19200 so you might need to change baud rates in mid 
  boot. I also needed to disable DMA as a few recent messages have mentioned. 
  But it doesn't sound like you're even getting that far. What are you 
  installing from and to?

 It's the other way round actually.  Soekris bios defaults to 19200 baud
 and FreeBSD to 9600.
 An easy solution is to set the bios to 9600, no need for acrobatics like
 changing baud rate in mid boot.

Along the same lines, you need to tell FreeBSD to use a serial console.
Otherwise it assumes you have a graphics adapter and keyboard attached.  I
forget off the top of my head the incantation needed, but it's in the
Handbook.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] FreeBSD 7.0 on a net4801?

[Jed Clear]

On Sat, 1 Mar 2008, Paul Hoffman wrote:
 At 5:56 PM +1100 3/1/08, Graham Menhennitt wrote:
 Every character typed by the FreeBSD boot process is erased after
 typing, at least using the console programs I have tried. It has
 always been this way. (I don't build my own kernels.)
 The Soekris BIOS talks at 9600 baud and FreeBSD defaults to 19200 so
 you might need to change baud rates in mid boot.
 No, it's not that. I see each character come up and disappear. As I
 said, I see the countdown happening.

If your net4801 has the comBIOS serial speed set to 19200 (the default),
at a certain point in the FreeBSD boot process, the default FreeBSD
configuration will change to 9600.  If your terminal [emulator] is still
set to 19200, you may see garbage, but you may also see nothing.

 But it doesn't sound like you're even getting that far. What are you
 installing from and to?

 7.0 RELEASE, from CD onto a CF card on a different machine.

 This might be a lot clearer if there was a simple way to get the
 FreeBSD boot stuff to leave its text on the serial console in a way
 that I could see. Am I missing some bit of passed-down wisdom here?

It does, if you configure it properly to use a serial console, but that is
not the default.  The handbook section on Serial Console is here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/serialconsole-setup.html

When you do 24.6.2 step 3, also check the speed setting in /etc/ttys
matches what you have in comBIOS and your terminal.  Note you can do those
commands while the CF card is mounted on your different machine, just
prepend the mount point to the file paths mentioned.

The handbood doesn't mention it, but you probably want to set dcons and
all the ttyv0-8 to off in /etc/ttys.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] Console connection

[Jed Clear]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, voip crazy wrote:
 I planned to install Debian on the 5501 box but I'm not sure if install it
 on a CF card or in a SATA 2,5 Hdd drive.
 Which kind of install will be easier? which one would have less error or
 patching?
 How about the life of a CF card compare with the life of a SATA drive?

Disk drive will likely be an easier install as typically you need a few
extra steps with the CF card so that it is used read mostly.  But there
are enough examples out there that this shouldn't be a factor.

All other things equal, the CF card should be more reliable as there are
no moving parts and less heat.  If you set up your CF read mostly, it
should last indefinitely.  If you need to write frequently to the CF (e.g.
persistant logs), you will need to do more research.  For starters, search
this list's archives for the discussion on Flash write cycles.

-Jed
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[Soekris] Nanobsd/FreeBSD 6.3-R won't boot

[Jed Clear]

After updating my build machine to FreeBSD 6.3R, I created a new NanoBSD
image for my net5501.  I used the same nano and kernel config files as
with 6.2R.  6.3R on the net5501 consistently fails the boot process while
trying to mount / off of the CF card (see console below). After that I
can't even get it to reboot off the old 6.2R partition, unless I pull the
power.

First off, has anyone else gotten 6.3R to boot on a net5501?

I'm planning on trying a GENERIC kernel next, but am wondering if 6.3R is
doing something different with DMA by default, perhaps needing the 1.32h
and i comBIOS fixes.  I think I have 1.32(release), at least it doesn't
display any suffix letter when it boots:  comBIOS ver. 1.32 20070606
Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Soekris Engineering.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

-Jed

Console output follows:
---
Timecounter TSC frequency 499904773 Hz quality 800
Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec
IPv6 packet filtering initialized, logging limited to 1 packets/entry
ipfw2 (+ipv6) initialized, divert enabled, rule-based forwarding disabled,
default to deny, logging limited to 5 packets/entry by default
ad0: 977MB SanDisk SDCFB-1024 HDX 4.03 at ata0-master WDMA2
ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=0
ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (0 retries left) LBA=0
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out LBA=0
ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=0
ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (0 retries left) LBA=0
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out stray irq7
LBA=0
ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=1
ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (0 retries left) LBA=1
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out LBA=1
ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (1 restray irq7
try left) LBA=0
ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (0 retries left) LBA=0
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out LBA=0
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a

Manual root filesystem specification:
  fstype:device  Mount device using filesystem fstype
   eg. ufs:da0s1a
  ?  List valid disk boot devices
  empty line   Abort manual input

mountroot

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Re: [Soekris] serial problem on new 5501

[Jed Clear]

On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Wim Kerkhoff wrote:
 Jed Clear said the following, On 1/15/2008 3:18 PM:
  On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Wim Kerkhoff wrote:
  I have a new 5501 here. Serial has never been used. I've tried all the
  common speeds, 8N1 no flow control, but no luck. The cable is definitely
  fine since it works with a switch.
  The switch could be DCE pin out and 5501 DTE (or vice versa).  Got a null
  modem to try in there?
 I'm in now with a real null modem cable, I should have known better then
 that.

I have gotten many new pieces of kit this year at work, about 40% are DCE
pin placement.  I had to start taking notes on which RJ-45 adapter to use
with which.  I say placement because all of them use male pins, where only
a DTE should be male.  About the only piece of gear I know that gets it
right is an external modem.  It's invariably DCE and female.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] serial problem on new 5501

[Jed Clear]

On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Wim Kerkhoff wrote:

 Hello all

 I have a new 5501 here. Serial has never been used. I've tried all the
 common speeds, 8N1 no flow control, but no luck. The cable is definitely
 fine since it works with a switch.

The switch could be DCE pin out and 5501 DTE (or vice versa).  Got a null
modem to try in there?

Default speed is 19200.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] Installing Debian on a 4501 with HDD on PCI Adapter

[Jed Clear]

On Tue, 4 Dec 2007, Heather Lockridge wrote:
 From dmesg, I see:
 hda: max request size: 128KiB
 hda: 2001888 sectors (1024 MB) w/1KiB Cache, CHS=1986/16/63
  hda: hda1

 Which I presume is the on-board IDE controller.
[snip]
 Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
 ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
 IT8212: IDE controller at PCI slot :00:11.0
 IT8212: chipset revision 19
 it821x: controller in smart mode.
 IT8212: 100% native mode on irq 10
 ide0: BM-DMA at 0xe020-0xe027, BIOS settings: hda:pio, hdb:pio
 ide1: BM-DMA at 0xe028-0xe02f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio
 natsemi dp8381x driver, version 2.0, June 27, 2006
   originally by Donald Becker [EMAIL PROTECTED]
   http://www.scyld.com/network/natsemi.html
   2.4.x kernel port by Jeff Garzik, Tjeerd Mulder
 natsemi eth0: NatSemi DP8381[56] at 0xa000 (:00:12.0), 
 00:00:24:c8:cd:5c, IRQ 11, port TP.
 natsemi eth1: NatSemi DP8381[56] at 0xa0001000 (:00:13.0), 
 00:00:24:c8:cd:5d, IRQ 5, port TP.
 natsemi eth2: NatSemi DP8381[56] at 0xa0002000 (:00:14.0), 
 00:00:24:c8:cd:5e, IRQ 9, port TP.
 Done.
 Begin: Mounting root file system... ...
 Begin: Running /scripts/local-top ...
 Done.
 Begin: Waiting for root file system... ...

 root file system never mounts.

Caveat, I am not a Linux person, but have watched SunOS and
FreeBSD booting way too many times.

My impression on reading this is that the entries in /etc/fstab don't
match the devices assigned between the BIOS and kernel.  It looks to me
like you are getting through the boot loader and the kernel has enumerated
the devices, so you must be reading a drive (assuming I didn't lose track
and you were net booting).  And it just seems like the right time in the
boot process that /etc/fstab has just come into play.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] 1GB Compact Flash 6.06 Dapper Soekris

[Jed Clear]

On Thu, 29 Nov 2007, ervin wrote:
  I'm pxe booting ubuntu dapper 6.06 to a Soekris 4501 (64MB RAM  1GB
 Compact Flash card) ... dhcp, tftp and the server install is running
 smoothly until I want to write the partitioning to the CF card 

  I tried guided and manual partitioning  same issue, which is:
   issue
 -
  The attempt to mount a file system with type swap in IDE1 master,  |
   | partition #5 (hda5) at none failed.
 --
 I made tests on different CF card 1GB  4GB and from both Sandisk 
 IBM ... no difference.

  My manual partitions:

  200 MB   /
  100 MB   swap
  350 MB   /usr
  350 MB   /var

I'm a BSD person, so I won't speculate on exactly what's going on, but it
seems like this is protecting you from your own folly.  Swap is the last
thing you want on a flash disk.  Flash has a limited number of writes
before it degrades.  ISTR that the spec for write cycles in in the
100s of thousands, which is fine for a digital camera, but a swap
partition will chew through that in no time.

Suggest you find a HOWTO specifically for a flash filesystem, which you
will probably find has no swap at all.  If you really need to have virtual
memory for your application, you could consider a CF format microdrive, or
an IDE laptop drive.

-Jed
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[Soekris] net5501 COM2 +5V pin

[Jed Clear]

Can someone confirm that the net5501 has the same COM2 pin out as the
net4801?  If so, can that +5V pin supply at least 60 mA?  I've got the 12V
1.5A wall wart supply and no rotating storage or PCI cards, just the CF
card.

If you're curious I'm considering connecting a Garmin GPS 18 LVC-5m.
Tips on getting this working with ntpd in FreeBSD 6.2 are also welcome, if
perhaps slightly off topic.  Although I expect my biggest challenge will
be getting enough of a view of the sky with all the aluminum siding

Thanks,

-Jed

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Re: [Soekris] NanoBSD question...

[Jed Clear]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, Bill Borton wrote:
 I'm trying to install various programs from Ports into my NanoBSD Build.

I'm looking at the following as a starting point for doing much the same
(e.g. NTP from ports), but haven't started in on that project yet.

http://www.nabble.com/Building-NanoBSD-with-ports-and-packages-t3614023.html

I say starting point because I think it could be a bit cleaner.  I recall
finding some solutions that were better integrated but got distracted and
didn't save any links beyond that one.  Anyway I think they all had the
same characteristics: build recursive packages from ports, null mount the
package directory within the NANO root, then chroot and install packages.

Side thought, with NTP you should remember to save off your drift file
periodically.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] Net5501 doesn't boot from HDU

[Jed Clear]

On Tue, 30 Oct 2007, Marco A. Calamari wrote:
 I configured Linux+Grub on the 5501 booting without hassle from a
  1GB CF. Today I added a tested Hitachi HDU with
  the ATA mounting kit

 The bios is a 1.32i and the HDU is cable select, as
  describet in a thread of this list.

 Pri Mas  Flash Card  LBA Xlt 1007-32-63  1015 Mbyte
 Pri Sla  Hitachi HTS541680J9AT00 LBA Xlt 1024-255-63  78 Gbyte

I seem to recall reading of some limitation where you could use CF or ATA,
but not both.  Not certain it was the net5501 either.  But check the
archives for Soren's posts.

Or just try removing the CF.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] Max MTU size

[Jed Clear]

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007, Jeff Quast wrote:
 I thought jumbo frames (gigabit nics) were for lessening interrupts.

Yes, and less checksum calculations.  However interrupt coalescing and TCP
Offload Engines make this less of an issue than it once was.

 A large frame that unpacks to many smaller frames by software (kernel).

No, typically any size frames are assembled back into one large logical
byte stream.

 It is not really 1500 bytes on the wire, is it?

Not a simple answer.  If your Path MTU supports 9k your packets remain
9k.  More likely you will encouter a 1500 byte MTU subnet and either have
your 9k packet fragmented or have to go throught the PMTUD process and end
up with 1500 byte packets from end to end.  But if you were asking if the
kernel or NIC breaks them down from 9k to 1500 all the time, then no.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] Max MTU size

[Jed Clear]

On Sun, 28 Oct 2007, Jan Hoevers wrote:
 Thomas Elsgaard wrote on 28-10-2007 8:19:
  Has anyone tried to use a MTU size above 1500 bytes on the soekris 5501
  ? I am looking for a device that can run with a MTU size of 1544

 Maximum ethernet frame size is 1548 if I recall well. An IP packet with
 a size of 1500 meets that maximum.

The Via 6105M Chips on the 5501 support 802.1q VLAN tagging, which would
be an Ethernet frame size of 1522, maintaining the IP packet size of 1500.
Since there is no mention of jumbo frames, that is likely it.  However the
link to the data sheet is 404'd, so we can't rule out some wiggle room.

Not sure why you're looking for 1544, but unless every device in the path
supports it, it may be futile.  Have you tried to get PMTUD working?

-Jed

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Re: [Soekris] Max MTU size

[Jed Clear]

On Sun, 28 Oct 2007, der Mouse wrote:
  The Via 6105M Chips on the 5501 support 802.1q VLAN tagging, which
  would be an Ethernet frame size of 1522,
 As I understand it, the maximum standard Ethernet frame is 1516 bytes:
 6 bytes of destination MAC, 6 of source MAC, 2 of frame type, 1500 of
 payload, and 2 of FCS.  802.1q increases this by 4 (2 for the
 vlan-tagged frame type and 2 for the vlan number, basically),
 bringing it to 1520, not 1522.  Where's the mistake?

4 bytes for FCS.

And in the interest of full disclosure, there are a preamble and SFD that
add 8 more bytes berfore the DA.
http://www.javvin.com/protocolEthernet.html

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] Project Feasibility

[Jed Clear]

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Joel Jaeggli wrote:
 Carlos M. Perez wrote:
  3 ? Remote Console ? need something that we can run GNOME/Desktop on so
  that we can remote in, and use the device?s local browser
  (Firefox/Opera) to configure network devices ranging from Copiers,
  printers, IP phones, access points.  If it has a web based GUI we need
  to access it.

 That's actually something that's better done with ssh port forwarding or
 an out and out ip tunnel of some sort (ip-in-ip l2tp ipsec etc)

 leaves you with a much lighter weight device and the browser runs
 locally on your own machine.

 for a concrete recipe example try this:

  ssh -l username bastion-host-name -L 8000:remotedevice-ip:80

 which will bind local port 8000 to port 80 in a device accessible from
 the other end of the tunnel to your bastion host.

If you have more than one or two end destinations at a given site, you
might want to extend the above solution a bit.  Run some sort of small,
non-caching, http proxy on the net and point the SSH tunnel at that.
Then configure your local browser to use localhost:8000 as a proxy.  You
should then be able to surf to all the remote web configs at a site w/o
rebuilding the tunnel for each.

-Jed
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Re: [Soekris] net4501 problem

[Jed Clear]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2007, ®Âµ¦ ®ÂmOs wrote:
 I try to install monowall on net4501, but I have a problem the network ligth
 never on. I try with different cable but nothing.

I don't think the 4501 has auto-MIDIX ports, so you must use a crossover
cable if you are connecting to another non-switch device, such as some DSL
bridges or Cable modems.  If you connect your 4501 temporarily to a
switch with that cable, and the LED comes on, that's likely the problem.

Googling ethernet crossover cable would be your next move for either DIY
or purchase.

-Jed
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