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.
I installed FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE i386 to a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 (3.5" 160GB) SATA harddisk on a different computer (let's call it SERVER). Sliced and partionened the disk; enabled DHCP and SSH; installed the FreeBSD. Boots fine on SERVER. Then I connected the SATA disk to the Soekris box, and powered up. I have connected several different terminal emulators to the Soekris box: Windows2000 / HyperTerminal Windows2000 / TeraTerm (Also tried Windows2000 / Poderosa; but missing the .NET libraries I did not succede) Ubuntu 9.04 / tip Ubuntu 9.04 / gtkterm Ubuntu 9.04 / cutecom For each of those I started out with 19200 baud, 8 bits, 1 stop bit. The Soekris box boots up nicely and shows the expected output in all the terminal emulators. I do not press control-P so Soekris loads the FreeBSD boot loader, which correctly shows the F1, F2, F3 options. I touch nothing and the boot loader (seemingly) starts to boot FreeBSD. I get a lot of gibberish (kind of the same in all the above emulators). However, i clearly notice some dash-slash-pipe-backslash repetiitons, so I kind-of expcted that FreeBSD was booting. After half a minute or so the output stops. However, the terminal seems non-responsive to any input (letters, CR/enter, control-C, etc). The Soekris box does not seem to acquire a DHCP address. After having tried this a lot of times (with the different terminal emulators) I give up. I remount the disk in the SERVER. The /var/log dir show NO log entries between the initial SERVER boot and the current one. So apparently the FreeBSD boot (if that is what is what) has not progressed to find the disk. Just "for the fun of it" I installed Ubuntu Lucid Alpha2 desktop on a free partition on the SERVER. Btw, this owerwrote the FreeBSD bootloader with GRUB2. (Yes, I could have chosen a stable server version of Ubuntu, but this was the CD I happened to have lying around). Booting the Soekris box I get GRUB loading. error: no such partition grub rescue> If I try the commands "?" or "help" I get Unknown command If I try "ls /" I still get error: no such partition Finally, on the SERVER I installed pfSense 2010.0217-2217. (Works like a charm on the SERVER and another box) But booting the Soekris box gives FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader boot: P Does anyone have a suggestion on what to try next ??? Thanks in advance /Henrik _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
