General Questions

HI,

just got mono wall working on a pc with cdrom and floppy.

I cant make it recognise the usb stick! Damm! any clues here? I formatted it in the windows pc to fat and fat32 then tried it in the pc. It says its a umass da0 and gives its name but doesnt appear to want to write to it.

It just gives the message no floppy or usb with any configuration.

i would like that as the floppy is sooooo slow!

thanks.

the only other option is getting a cf to ide adapter.

Are you using 1.3b9 or 1.232? USB sticks are only supported in 1.3b for configuration storage...

yes 1.3b9 at the moment.

I can see the da0 device all seemingly correct when it boots up in the boot messages,
-----------------------------------------------boot messages-------------------
Jan 20 01:36:23 m0n0wall kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
Jan 20 01:36:23 m0n0wall kernel: da0: <DSE Micro drive 0.00> Removable Direct Access SCSI-2 device
Jan 20 01:36:23 m0n0wall kernel: da0: 1.000MB/s transfers
Jan 20 01:36:23 m0n0wall kernel: da0: 121MB (248000 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 121C)
Jan 20 01:36:23 m0n0wall kernel: Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/md0
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But if there is no floppy in the machine it complains there is no config available from either usb or floppy, I even tried copying the config from the floppy onto the usb stick. Still no joy.

dev/md0        29534 26962   2572    91%    /
devfs               2     2      0   100%    /dev
/dev/da0       247488    64 247424     0%    /mnt/usb1
/dev/fd0         2849    56   2793     2%    /cf

is what i get after i mounted it myself after creating a mount point
mkdir /mnt/usb1
then mounting it,
mount_msdosfs -m 644 -M 755 /dev/da0 /mnt/usb1

I am realy struggling to get this far as I am just starting with Freebsd and have to lookup every single thing that i need to do! I am so green!

Just not sure if Monowall should mount the stick by itself ir how to get monowall to use this as its config storage device?

I copied the config directory with confg.xml file over to the usb stick and tried booting again, tried fat and fat32 both dont seem to work.

The cdrom version 1.3b9 appears to only recognise the floppy as a config storage. I tried remove the floppy and boot with only the usb stick in but it just says no floppy or usb stick for configurations yet the bsd boot messages seem to recognise it. Then i can manually add the mount point and mount it.

Any advise or tests would be appreciated.

I cant set the bios to boot from the usb stick (due to the age i think) even though i have the latest firmware loaded. Its a HP Vectra Celeron 333 with 440bx motherboard.  Boot options include floppy/cdrom/network/zip/floptical but none seem to want to boot from the usb stick.

Of course i maybe the problem and just not selected the right options yet! I did set another motherboard to boot ok but thats my main pc and cant give that up for monowall.

In the 192.168.1.1/exec.php i can get a listing of the file on the stick after i boot and mount it of course, as below.

$ ls /mnt/usb1/conf
config.xml


Thanks for ay guidance to over come this hurdle mate.

PS i then saw in the 192.168.1.1/status.php that the config.xml is in /conf to tried to umount it from /mnt/usb1 then mount it onto /conf   I thought it had worked but when saving anything in the normal web gui it just goes straight to the floppy again.

In reference to the original question, Yes.

Some CF cards can go beyond 35MB/ps.  Last I checked....floppy was capped at ....much less, I don't even remember...double digit Kilobytes.

My old monowall used to run off of CD and floppy, at the moment it's all running from a hard drive, even THAT transition is mind blowing, the whole thing boots now in less than 10 seconds.  Back with the CD and floppy config....it took a lot longer, but that was atleast partially the fault of the old motherboard too insisting on doing a full 512MB ram check every boot....

But either way, not having seek times in your storage media access makes a much bigger difference than most people give it credit for.  Keep in mind though, ATA/33 and ATA/66 aren't any faster than about 4MB/ps and 8MB/ps respectively.  So don't rush out and buy the world's fastest CF media so you can shave a half second off your boot time..if that...

Just about any old CF media will out-perform a CD-Floppy Config.

thanks for that...

i have a cf to ide adapter in transit to me as we type. the mb usb idea didnt work but i am sure the compact flash on an ide interface will be the bee
s knees.

thanks again..