Installation

Hello all,

I've been using m0n0wall for a few years now and never before have I seen what it's doing today.  I got the latest ISO, burned it to a CD, it boots fine.  I go to install it on my USB drive and on some machines it appears to do nothing at all.  On other machines I get bad directory errors, and on my last attempt it looked like gunzip failed to decompress something.  I'm tempted to point a finger at the install media, but I thought I'd see if anyone else was having the same issue.


Thanks

Could You try burning another CD possibly with another CD drive? I think it's damaged installation media.

I haven't had such problems, only twice i had something that was remotely similar, so i was unable to install m0n0 - in the first case the HDD was almost dead, and in the second the flash drive was dead. In both scenarios the equipment was way too old and beyond repair and didn't work with anything else too.

I actually tried the latest snapshot, as well as the latest stable release.  Oddly enough, the snapshot installed on a SATA drive, but it will not install to any USB drive I have.  I've tried formatting the usb drives as free space, fat32, fat16....no luck.  The system that installed m0n0wall on the SATA drive, was unfortunately not my firewall.  My firewall system won't let me install any version of m0n0wall on any device, it kernel panics.  If I take that SATA drive that boots and put it in my firewall, it kernel panics there too.  Is there any reason a freeBSD core wouldn't boot on an AMD E350?

Formatting any destination media (HDD, CF, DOM, USB drive) in advance for for a m0n0wall install is pointless. The installation process itself takes care of preparing the destination drive and will remove any existing format on the device.

You may have better luck by trying to write a m0n0wall image file to the device as opposed to using the CD installer.

That's what I thought too but I guess I misunderstood the instructions somewhere.  I finally got the bootable image on the flash drive, so hooray to that. (I dd'ed the image onto the USB drive, which I tried in windows, linux, and OS X, it only worked in OS X)  However, now when it comes up I see this in the last few lines:

panic: ohci_add_done : addr 0xcfee1510 not found
Uptime: 1s
Cannot dump. No dump device defined.

Then is says it's trying to restart, and that I can hit a key to abort the restart, but no keyboard I've tried responds at this point.  I'm guessing that's as a result of the panic?

What does this mean?

thanks for the responses so far

What hardware are you trying to run m0n0 on?

I don't run from USB here, but today I did write the image to a USB thumb drive and it booted fine on an AMD PC.

I'm using a  GA-E350N-USB3 (rev. 1.0)

www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3681

It's pretty bland, shouldn't be anything too exotic on this board.  m0n0wall gets to the point right after it finds the kernel and then it panics.

Just for funzies, I tried booting FreeBSD 9.1 amd64 on it, which works more or less fine.  I'm not sure where the hold-up is.

I've tried setting the bios to fail-safe defaults, i've tried switching some options to suit unix better, same results.

Linux distros i've tried work fine....actually, pretty much any OS that isn't m0n0wall works pretty well.

In one test, I wrote the m0n0wall image to a usb stick, and booted my mac mini with it - which worked perfectly.

I used that same stick to try and boot the amd E350 and it panics as described above.

I'll assume you are not trying to use the USB 3.0 ports.

These threads seems to report a similar/same problem, but no resolution was posted:

http://forums.pcbsd.org/showthread.php?t=8370

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=5362

You say things work with FreeBSD 9.1, but m0n0wall 1.8 is FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p4 based. Can you try that release and see what happens?

Ahhh, I think I see what might be wrong.  I thought 1.8 was based on FreeBSD 9.1.  I did try to use both USB 2 and USB 3 ports.  However, I was unaware there would be a problem using USB 3.  Lack of driver support?

For the sake of curiousity, I'd be interested to see if I can get FreeBSD 8.3-p4 to boot on it.  I'll let you know what I find.

Those other threads were interesting....I'll do closer, more carefully measured testing this weekend if I can.

I guess going forward I might have to stick with 9.1 and just fiddle together the built-in firewall tools until m0n0wall moves it's release up to 9.1