[Soekris] Problem getting started with 4801 & monowall

[Greg Shenaut]

Hi, in May I bought a net4801-60. I got pulled away from that project  
before I could actually use it for anything, but over the holidays, I  
tried to install monowall on it without success.

Here's what I did.

I have two SanDisk 512gb cf devices. I downloaded the most recent  
beta of monowall, and then used a lexar firewire flash reader and dd  
to install it. I am using a Powerbook, so this involved putting in  
the firewire cable, unmounting the resulting volume, and then dd'ing  
to the drive. I was able to read back what I wrote using cmp.

Next, I put inserted the cf drive into the socket on the soekris and  
connected using a keyspan usb/serial cable and kermit. I got the boot  
messages and interacted with the BIOS from the console, but every  
time I tried to boot the soekris, it eventually stopped with a simple  
"boot error" message (and no other discernable error report). I tried  
it with the other Sandisk, and I also tried two other versions of  
monowall.

In summary: two different 512G Sandisks, three different versions of  
monowall, Lexar firewire CF reader, Powerbook, OS/X 10.4.8,  
net4801-60 : "boot error".

What I suspect, assuming that I don't have a DOA Soekris, is that  
there is something wrong with my copying the image onto the cf  
device. The light on the cf reader blinks when I write, so something  
is going on with it, but maybe there is some kind of byte order or  
sector mapping problem, or maybe it's not really writing onto the cf  
device at all but into a buffer.

The net4801 appears to have the most recent BIOS (128).

What should I try next?

Thanks,

Greg Shenaut