Well, I can give you some negative evidence on your problems. I've been
using a 4801 firewall for several years with OpenBSD, and it's been
incredibly stable. I was using, um, 3.6 up until a couple days ago, and
just upgraded to 4.0-current. It's been running for a couple of days
now exactly as it has for years; I'll often get months of uptime. My
limiting factor there is AC power, not the OS or hardware. It's an
appliance I just don't have to think about, and I like it very much.
(note that I use only a 512MB CF card and nothing else, and I'm on the
old hardware that doesn't support DMA, so this isn't a perfect
correspondence with your situation.)
In general, both Soekris hardware and OpenBSD tend to be exceedingly
reliable, so I'd suggest checking a couple things. First, look at what
dmesg says about your hardware. I'll attach my dmesg output as a text
file; make sure yours looks roughly similar. If it's much different,
try compiling the custom NET4801 kernel from flashdist. I've had very
good luck with its configuration choices. (and that's what's providing
the dmesg here, btw.)
If that doesn't solve your issues, then I'd try a bigger power supply.
As long as you get the pin size and the polarity correct, the Soekris
should handle pretty much anything common you'd find that's 8v or
higher. (there's a window between 5v and about 7v where it won't work
properly; you have to provide either exactly 5v or several volts more.
The exact specs are in the docs.) Borrow something beefy from another
device and see if things improve at all. If you've got a hardware
problem, I bet that's where it is.
If all that fails, I'd try installing Linux just for giggles. It often
has more coherent error messages. If you still have no luck, maybe you
got a bad 4801. That's ... unusual, but certainly possible.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Two weeks ago, I installed a net4801 (with vpn1411, a 13Gb 2.5" HDD and 4Gb
CompactFlash) to act as a firewall/router for my home network. So far ... it's
not quite going to plan.
I had to disabled the vpn1411 straight away, since otherwise it disabled SSH
access. I removed it yesterday afternoon, but didn't get any improvement from
that. (If anyone has any ideas for getting the vpn1411 to work properly, that
would be nice, but from what I've seen so far that's probably far off?)
Next, I moved the two filesystems off the HDD onto CompactFlash and tried
'atactl /dev/wd0c sleep', in the hope it might be a power supply issue; I got
my hopes up after it managed to stay operational for several hours after that,
but it has now failed (and required power-cycling) twice in the last two hours.
There's nothing of value in any logs that I can see (normal activity - NTP and
DHCPD - up until the box stops working, then a normal bootup). I don't have a
system with a serial port within cable-reach of the Internet connection, so I
can't see if anything gets put on the serial console; I'll see if I can find a
suitable USB converter in town tomorrow.
There does seem to be activity on the two interfaces I'm using (activity LED
flickering), but nothing getting through; sometimes it's only the
Internet-facing interface which dies, so I can SSH in and do a clean reboot
instead of power-cycling. (ifconfig down doesn't seem to help: the interface
never gets configured with an IP address again for some reason, even through
the dhclient process succeeds in getting a lease.)
I can't see any mention of this on OpenBSD lists; the inability to configure an
IP address does sound like an OS issue rather than hardware, but there are no
errors logged at all! (Not in dmesg, not in netstat -nI sis[0-2]...)
Suggestions anyone?
James.
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OpenBSD 4.0-stable (NET4801) #1: Sun Jul 6 01:16:07 EDT 2008
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/NET4801
cpu0: Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by National Semi ("Geode by NSC"
586-class) 267 MHz
cpu0: FPU,TSC,MSR,CX8,CMOV,MMX
cpu0: TSC disabled
real mem = 133787648 (130652K)
avail mem = 119230464 (116436K)
using 1658 buffers containing 6791168 bytes (6632K) of memory
mainbus0 (root)
bios0 at mainbus0: AT/286+(00) BIOS, date 20/50/29, BIOS32 rev. 0 @ 0xf7840
pcibios0 at bios0: rev 2.0 @ 0xf0000/0x10000
pcibios0: pcibios_get_intr_routing - function not supported
pcibios0: PCI IRQ Routing information unavailable.
pcibios0: PCI bus #0 is the last bus
bios0: ROM list: 0xc8000/0x9000
cpu0 at mainbus0
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1 (bios)
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0 "Cyrix GXm PCI" rev 0x00
sis0 at pci0 dev 6 function 0 "NS DP83815 10/100" rev 0x00, DP83816A: irq 10,
address 00:00:24:c1:56:08
nsphyter0 at sis0 phy 0: DP83815 10/100 PHY, rev. 1
sis1 at pci0 dev 7 function 0 "NS DP83815 10/100" rev 0x00, DP83816A: irq 10,
address 00:00:24:c1:56:09
nsphyter1 at sis1 phy 0: DP83815 10/100 PHY, rev. 1
sis2 at pci0 dev 8 function 0 "NS DP83815 10/100" rev 0x00, DP83816A: irq 10,
address 00:00:24:c1:56:0a
nsphyter2 at sis2 phy 0: DP83815 10/100 PHY, rev. 1
gscpcib0 at pci0 dev 18 function 0 "NS SC1100 ISA" rev 0x00
gpio0 at gscpcib0: 64 pins
"NS SC1100 SMI" rev 0x00 at pci0 dev 18 function 1 not configured
pciide0 at pci0 dev 18 function 2 "NS SCx200 IDE" rev 0x01: DMA, channel 0
wired to compatibility, channel 1 wired to compatibility
wd0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 0: <SanDisk SDCFH-512>
wd0: 1-sector PIO, LBA, 488MB, 1000944 sectors
wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2
geodesc0 at pci0 dev 18 function 5 "NS SC1100 X-Bus" rev 0x00: iid 6 revision 3
wdstatus 0
ohci0 at pci0 dev 19 function 0 "Compaq USB OpenHost" rev 0x08: irq 11, version
1.0, legacy support
usb0 at ohci0: USB revision 1.0
uhub0 at usb0
uhub0: Compaq OHCI root hub, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1
uhub0: 3 ports with 3 removable, self powered
isa at gscpcib0 not configured
isa0 at mainbus0
isadma0 at isa0
nsclpcsio0 at isa0 port 0x2e/2: NSC PC87366 rev 9: GPIO VLM TMS
gpio1 at nsclpcsio0: 29 pins
gscsio0 at isa0 port 0x15c/2: SC1100 SIO rev 1:
npx0 at isa0 port 0xf0/16: reported by CPUID; using exception 16
pccom0 at isa0 port 0x3f8/8 irq 4: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
pccom0: console
pccom1 at isa0 port 0x2f8/8 irq 3: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
biomask fbe7 netmask ffe7 ttymask ffe7
dkcsum: wd0 matches BIOS drive 0x80
root on wd0a
rootdev=0x0 rrootdev=0x300 rawdev=0x302
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