Installation

Some of you may have noticed that I posted a complicated unix command line question in another forum...the reason for that was I can't seem to get monowall to install on a particular flash device.


Basicially, the situation is this....I have a motherboard on which the flash is embedded, but is still technically an ata/33 compatible flash device.  The bios can only use hard drives and flash media.  There is no floppy port and cd-rom drives are out of the question.  USB devices will also not work being that there are no USB ports.  The only way I can figure out to get monowall onto the onboard flash is to put some operating system on the hard drive that this motherboard can boot, and then install monowall onto the built-in flash from there.  To complete the firewall, It must not be using the hard drive it's working with now.

Right now, I have monowall on the hard drive and it boots perfectly fine but I can't for the life of me figure out how to tell freeBSD to write the generic-pc image to the onboard flash.

Going back a step and assuming for a moment that there's some small, magic OS that I could use on that hard drive to write the monowall image to the onboard flash, what OS might that be?  I tried FreeDOS...but that...for whatever reason, won't install on the hard drive.  Any creative solutions for installing monowall on a motherboard like this?

Tried FreeDOS again, and DOS proved to be diagnositcally worthless, as it won't even see devices unless they're seen by the bios at boot time.  To be fair, this motherboard also has the world's least cooperative bios I've ever used.

I'm going to try Gentoo linux (if I can figure out how to install in on the hard drive) because apparently linux's gunzip utility writes images, which *should* make life easier.

A weird thing though, I tried installing FreeBSD on the harddrive and booting that...but...it locked up when I tried to boot it on the firewall motherboard, it said something about my keyboard and then stopped booting.  How can monowall boot but not freebsd?  There's pleanty of ram...and the core is 366MHz, it's not like it can't handle a full BSD install...

So, FreeDOS was a bust...I'll get around to Gentoo today sometime....maybe try FreeBSD again if Gentoo doesn't work.....and then...NetBSD....

FreeDOS by the way, has been at it's V1.0 milestone release "final" phase for over a year now.  Yet...the OS won't boot from a hard drive unless you type in "sys c:" after it tells you that the install was successful and all you need to do is reboot.  If you Install the OS in full, and reboot, it just says "boot error" and gives *no* error message of value.  How hard could it possibly have been for them to script "sys c:" into the OS installer?  How do they expect recreational users to ever be able to use their software without error messages that actually tell you what's wrong?  Ugh.  I was convinced that my hard drive was actually unusable because of how FreeDOS reacted to....its own installer.  I've done several scans of the drive since then and it's perfectly fine.

If anyone knows anything about the installation of these OSes, particularly Gentoo, please please PLEASE post info here...most tutorials I find either lie, or are out of date.

Shove a FreeBDS hard drive in there.  wget the image you want, and gzcat to write it to the flash.  Follow the instructions here, but without the CD. http://chrisbuechler.com/index.php?id=17