Hardware

Hi,

I have tried everything I can think of, and everything from a zillion forum messages etc etc, and I'm stumped. So I thought it time to ask the experts

I have a Lanner FW-7650 appliance. Its basically a standard PC, with 6 Ethernet ports.

We run eBox on it, from a hard disk, because we use it for content filtering/Web proxy. The box works (and well), but last week we had a power outage that caused file system issues with the hard disk, so I had to remove it and repair it. This led to 2 hours downtime. So my boss has asked me to devise a 'fallback' solution.

The Lanner has an on-board CF adapter - so "Perfect" I thought, "I'll stick M0n0wall on a CF and away we go!"

Well - it didn't work out so well. I cannot get the Generic-PC v1.32 boot image to output anything via the serial!

The box itself does VGA redirection to the Serial interface via a BIOS setting. We use this to monitor the POST. Then with the eBox setup, we have Grub redirecting everything to the serial. It works, and works well. The baud rate is 115200 (with a slowest setting of 34000).

The Lanner has an on-board PS/2 header, but no connector - and a VGA header - but no connector.

The 'embedded' image does not load (halts with a CPU undefined error) but the embedded image *does* output to the serial, so I know M0n0wall can do it.

I suspect that the Serial redirection of the VGA is convincing M0n0 that it has a screen attached, and thus not enabling the serial output. Unfortunately, if we disable this, then we are blind to the POST, and that would be a problem.

What can I do??? I've tried everything I can think of, and after 5 hours, I give up. I wish it was possible to forcefully enable the serial in the GUI or somewhere, as I could boot the image in a different unit and set it.

I would appreciate any and all suggestions.

Many thanks in advance,

Geoff

I have 1.33 generic serial running on a Lanner FW-7550 which I think is similar to yours. First, try setting you comm program to 9600,8,N,1. And, remember that you -must- us a null modem cable or adapter (pins 2 & 3 reversed on one end) between a PC running serial comm and the Lanner and be sure to set you comm progam for NO hardware handshaking.

Boot and wait a bit, long enough for it to post and start loading m0n0. The bios post redirect stuff is at the higher baud rate but m0n0wall outputs at 9600.  Also, go into the bios and have a look at the boot order and be sure the correct HDD is set at the top of the boot order. On mine it is HDD-0 for the CF card. 
Lucky for me that the 7550 bios has serial setting for 9600 so I also changed that and I can now see both bios post and m0n0.

muppetgeoff - Which m0n0wall image are you using, the generic-pc or generic-pc-serial?

Hi Fred,

Wow, this post seems like an eon ago! The generic-pc-serial image didn't exist when I was doing this, and I eventually hacked up a VGA connector for the board and went with eBox (now Zentyal).

However, I replaced this old lanner a few months ago, and finally pulled it last week, so the timing is perfect! I will be testing out the generic-pc-serial image as soon as I get back from my holiday. thank you for making me aware of it. And thank you for your response too Falken.

Kind regards,

Geoff

I have also tried to get the serial port working with m0n0 generic-pc-serial on a dedicated appliance, a GTA GNATBox GB-1000 that I picked up for $20 on ebay.

The original GNATBox software works of course with the unit's serial port, as do pfsense 1.2.3 embedded images. But alas m0n0 does not.

No amount of fooling with it has gotten the serial port working with m0n0, and there really isn't anything to fool with other than COMM settings as the BIOS isn't reachable.

But m0n0 runs fine otherwise. I just did enough minimal configuration elsewhere and then moved the CF card into the GB-1000. Once it boots and the LAN interface is reachable, the Web GUI works fine to finish configuration.

It would be nice to have the serial port working, but I can live without it. pfsense is way more than I want or need here right now, but if I had to have the serial port, that would be the way to go.

Good luck.