Installation

Hi All.  I used to use m0n0wall about 11 years ago and have been away from it since then.  I had a project come up at work that I thought it would be a good fit for, so i'm back.

I have purchased a Soekris net6501-50 board and am trying to get m0n0wall loaded.  I had initially planned to load m0n0 on a SATA HDD, however after receiving the board it looks like I can have either a quad port ethernet add-on card OR a HDD but not both, and I need the extra ethernet ports.  This board doesn't have a CF slot but it does have a bootable USB port so I tried loading the generic PC serial image on a 2 GB USB thumb drive using physdiskwrite and booting from that.

I'm getting confusing results.  The first couple attempts the system would not boot and came up with an error about not being able to find the config file.  However after I get that error, it says press any key to reboot and when I do that then it boots up to the m0n0 console setup menu where I have options 1-6.

However, after I assign network ports and reboot I'm back to a configuration not found error.  I go through the same process of rebooting and it will boot again.  Interestingly, the network port selections I make ARE saved, so I'm not sure why every other boot it will say it can't find the config file.

Any suggestions?

I usually run m0n0wall on ALIX boards. but because I'm curious I grabbed one of the SOEKRIS 6501 I own and installed m0n0wall 1.8.1 on it. to get as close as possible to your setup, I also plugged in the SOEKRIS quad-port NIC. only difference: instead of a USB thumbdrive I've got an mSATA SSD as system-disk. to me it looks as if this is running absolutely flawless, I can't see any of the behaviour you're describing...

I suggest that you're getting an mSATA SSD. maybe a different USB drive would solve the problem, too.

I think there may have been some BIOS updates for the Soekris net6501 series. Are you current?

I have an SSD that I had planned to use, but like I said I don't think I can fit that in the case with the quad ethernet card.  I'm not familiar with mSATA SSDs but if that'll work I'll get one.  Where would that go inside the case?

Re: bios, I'll have to check.  It's a brand new board (just out of the box) so I sort of assumed it would be current.

Nevermind, I just looked up mSATA and looked at some diagrams of the 6501 to see where it would go and it looks like that's what I need.  I ordered an mSATA SSD so hopefully when I put m0n0wall on that these issues go away.

Hi,

I'm currently running m0n0wall on a USB stick on a 6501-30 flawlessly. The only difference I can see with your setup is that I used dd to put the image on the USB stick.

Running 6501-30 here too using USB stick.
Also used dd, in Mac OS X. Been running fine for a very long time now.

Never used a mSATA SSD in it. Didn't know I could get the serial image on a SSD...
Or maybe not at the time I bought the Soekris.