[Soekris] pfSense on Soekris 6501?

[michael.sperber@active-group.de]

Thanks for looking at this!

Jim Pingle <lists at pingle.org> writes:

> On 12/20/2011 2:42 AM, michael.sperber at active-group.de wrote:
>> I'm trying to get pfSense working on a 6501 with a Transcend mSATA
>> SSD. Unfortunately, at boot, I get read timeouts on the SSD when it
>> tries to mount the root filesystem.  The SSD seems fine under Linux and
>> under NanoBSD 9.0-RC3, so it may be a driver problem.  Any suggestions
>> on making this work would be much appreciated!
>
> What exactly does the mountroot error screen look like? 

I get a bunch of messages like so:

TIMEOUT - READ retrying (1 retry left) LBA=xxxx

Finally one goes

TIMEOUT - READ retrying (0 retry left) LBA=xxxx

and then the root mount is aborted.

> How did you get pfSense onto the mSATA drive?

I booted a PLD Linux via netboot and then dd'ed a nanobsd pfSense image
onto the SSD.  (Exactly the same procedure I used for installing plain
vanilla NanoBSD, which worked just fine.)

> If you installed on another box and moved, you'll probably have to
> manually specify the right root slice, then once it's booted, edit fstab.

No, that's not the problem: As I said, it's trying to read from the
correct slice, but then fails.

> Failing that, have you tried using the boot option that says "Boot
> pfSense using USB device"? 

I can boot pfSense off a USB stick (even though only the third USB stick
we tried did actually work), if that's what you mean (which does require
setting kern.cam.boot_delay) - but that seems at best a temporary
substitute for running it off the SSD.

-- 
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla