Hardware

Two of the GB-1000 units have become available again on ebay. They want $24.99US plus $17.70US shipping.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Global-Technology-Firewall-Appliance-GB-1000-/190516081514?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c5ba4b36a

Something told me to try getting the console to work with this hardware again.

So I hooked up the null modem cable to the GB-1000, opened HyperTerminal and tried to establish a connection using 9600, 8, N, 1, Hardware Flow Control.

I hit the enter key and it worked!

The troubling part is that:

This is m0n0wall, version 1.33
built on Wed Mar 16 12:01:51 CET 2011 for generic-pc

but NOT generic-pc-serial, which was what I had been trying with all along and got nowhere.

Strange, but I'll take it.

Any comments or thoughts on this?

I am not sure, but i think that the menu is printed to output device already, and for next printing of the menu at least one enter on input is needed. So my guess is that's why it would stay just blank on connection.

Requiring an enter wasn't my point.

The point was that I had been unsuccessfully trying to get this to work with the pc-serial version of m0n0wall, the one coded to provide console output on the serial port, and the logical choice to try.

The surprise was that the "Generic PC " version works with the serial port on this hardware. This version does not, however, offer a console on the serial port of an ordinary PC, nor would one expect it to.