Hardware

hi,

just bought a neostation neo 3000 on ebay for £4.90... will see if i can get m0n0wall running on it.

i have installed m0n0wall 1.23 on a 1gb laptop hd via a pc with the knoppix cd. this is running fine in a cyrix box with 3 realtek nic's.

did a test on the £4.90 costing neo 3000 and it was starting up! but with some errors due to only having 32mb of ram...

have orded a 128mb so-dimm  so hoppefully i can do some more tests this weekend if it arrives on time. i couldn't use the dimm slot since i have a compaq dual nic pci card and the 128mb dimm is to high... 

bt

the 128mb so-dimm didn't arrived in the post today... so will see it on monday...

well by the end of the day i got some 64mb sodimms from a collega at work.

so yesterday evening i started to shutdown my pc m0n0wall box. took the laptop hd and the compaq dual nic out of the pc box. connected the hd in the neo 3000. exchanged the 32mb sodimm for a 64mb one. build the compaq dual nic in the neo 3000 and fire it up... guess what one the internal realtek nic was active...

so a lot of trouble shooting was going on. i changed settings in the bios of the neo 3000 etc. nothing helped. so i build everything back in the pc box. all was working directly again. so my family was happy again since i have 2 dreamboxes and an card sharing server running. network down no tv...

what i discovert was that the internal realtek nic of the neo 3000 was comming up as the second nic. i have tested this with a pci realtek nic. if i started m0n0wall with this combination the internal nic was rl1 and the pic card realtek was rl0.

so now i changed the order of the pci cards in my pc box so that the compaq dual nic was comming as first and the pci realtek card as second. moved every thing back in the neo 3000 and now i had the compaq dual nic active, but only on (first) port!

so now i had compaq dual nic (first) on wan and the internal realtek on lan. no matter what i tried i was unsuccessful to get the second port of the compaq dual nic working.

what did i try:

lots of settings in the bios (manual pci, plug/play bios on and off, disable everything not needed)
reset m0n0wall to factory defaults
start m0n0wall up with NO utp cables connected

unfortnaly i see no out put on the serial port of the neo 3000 since it has build in video. i don't have a video card in my pc box and use the serial out put for monitoring.

so any body here who can point me to a direction?

thx,
bt

Just ordered an SMC dual port PCI NIC from Germany.

I don't trust Compaq stuff, to propriety. It might due to the fact that the Compaq has only 1 BIOS for both ports… We will see when the SMC arrives.

received ide -> cf adapter from hongkong yesterday. this is one who fits nicely on the onboard 40 pins ide connector.

a quick test with the smc dual nic was successfull but the box freezes after 1 min. there is no message on the console. i used the generic pc version 1.23. further test will follow.

if any one can tell me how i can see more output what happened on the box that should be nice. remember i only have about 1 min till it freezes.

cheers,
bt

Just tried the latest beta (generic-pc-1.3b2) version but M0n0wall still freezes on this box. I have 2 of those Neoware boxes and they do the same...

Any one out here why can help me with this?

After some tries I saw this message on the console:

de0: abnormal interrupt: transmit underflow (raising TX threshold to 96|256)

After this message the M0n0wall box freezes...

At the moment I'm test driving the box with a second Realtek NIC (removed the SMC dual port NIC). This Neoware box has only 1 PCI slot... I need 3 NIC's, WAN, LAN & DMZ. The box is running for over an hour now. Laptop on LAN is playing groove salad to generate traffic through the Neoware M0n0wall.

Is there any way to tweak the de driver?

did dmesg in m0n0wall/exec.php

went trough the output and find out that the smc nic was on irq 14 and irq 11 where also the internal realtek on irq 11 is. tried many bios settings to force them to get all different irq's but no success.

the test i did with an extra realtek pci nic to replace the smc nic was successful the box was still up and running the next morning. so it must be a problem with a dual nic. shared irq?

bt

yep, shared IRQ's can cause all kinds of problems in FreeBSD on some systems. Sounds like that's the cause of the problem.

is this shared IRQ a FreeBSD problem only?

i have contact with a guy who has the same Neoware 3000 box with an Compaq NC3131 but successfully running IPCop on it...

Found this on Internet:

Are there any particular IRQ settings which should be used for various types of adapter cards?

The important thing to consider is how IRQ's are shared between devices.  Only devices of the same type should be configured to share IRQ's.  Changing a standard device's IRQ (such as for the PS/2 mouse) may require some kernel hacking.  It would be especially prudent to check that the System Configuration Utility chose IRQs wisely when third party adapters have been installed.

I see it most commonly with FreeBSD, but I work mostly with FreeBSD (and Windows). It doesn't ever seem to be an issue in Windows, but there are tons of things that don't work consistently or properly in Linux and FreeBSD that work fine with Windows on the same hardware.

With the Neoware hardware, keep in mind Neoware only cares if it runs Linux and Windows CE. If it has hardware bugs that aren't evident on either of those OS's, they're going to go unfixed. Hardware bugs of this nature are very common, I have seen tons of hardware that works with Windows but not FreeBSD or Linux, or works with Windows and FreeBSD but not Linux, or works with Windows and Linux but not FreeBSD, because of hardware quirks that the non-working OS doesn't account for. Linux gets really ugly with that stuff because one kernel revision can break something that used to work, then it gets re-fixed a year down the road and it works again...

Update;

With a 'real' Intel Dual Port adapter and the latest M0n0Wall beta it's working for about 30 min...

Will have a nice line up of Dual Port Adapters in the minute... eBay?? 

Update,

After many tests I came to the conclusion that you can run m0n0wall on a NeoWare 3000 without any problems as long you use a RealTek RTL8139 NIC in the PCI slot. This has to do with IRQ sharing of the NIC's.

So to build a nice 2 port m0n0wall Firewall for very little money (eBay) you can use a NeoWare box with an extra Realtek RTL8139 PCI nic, a 64Mb SODIMM, 8Mb CF card + IDE adapter and install M0n0wall on it. Low power and cheap firewall with no fan noise. 

Since I need to have a DMZ I need to have 3 NIC's. So I can't use this Neoware box. 

If there is a Dual Port NIC based on the Realtek RTL8139 chip set please let me know and I will test this.

Kind Regards,
bt

What kind of Intel card did you try? Or are there only one dual port  32bit PCI card from Intel...? A shame really, I just ordered 3 Neoware Eon 2000 boxes on ebay, and have several dual Intel cards :/

There must be a way... I will do some testing as soon as the boxes arrive. Though, I'm not sure what the hardware differences between eon 2000 and eon 3000 are.

Glad to hear that more people are trying this. The Intel Nic is the Dual Port 32bit PCI Server 100+ NIC. Very nice NIC's and running fine on a PC box.

The problem lies in the IRQ share of different hardware what doesn't work in FreeBSD. Every time you boot the box one of the NIC's (port) is sharing a IRQ with the on-board Realtek NIC. This will scruw the IRQ and hangs the box when pushing some traffic through the NIC's.

I had a search for BIOS updates but without any luck. I was hoping to find some BIOS so you can control the IRQ's on this box. If you manage to get an uniek IRQ's for every device it will work for sure.

At the moment I have one of the NeoWare box working fine as FreeNAS box, got 400Gb external USB drive. But also here I got the same problem as soon I use a PCI USB v2.0 card. Then when booting the box the Realtek and the PCI USB card gets stock and hangs the box. A real shame since those boxes only has on-board USB v1.0

But anyway let us know how you are getting on. I like those little boxes, small, low power and no noise.