I have a Nokia IP130 firewall/VPN device that stopped booting and was
discarded by my employer. I've replaced the hard drive in it and am now
trying to load pfSense onto it. Does anybody here know why FreeBSD 6.1
wouldn't boot on a Geode x586 processor?

3 responses total.

I don't know so much about the internals of the IP130.  Is it basically
a PC in a tiny box?  If other people have done this then I'd guess that
there is something twitched on its mainboard.

Does it start to boot and then die?

Maybe putting the disk in a pc and building your boot environment there
and then switching the disk back to the IP130?

The IP130 is a basically an embedded PC. It uses laptop components like
memory and hard drives, but has a Geode processor. It also has a three
port ethernet interface. There are no keyboard, monitor or mouse ports,
just a serial console.

Anyway, when I started fiddling with it I found that it was running
IPSO, the Nokia "hardened" operating system that you run Checkpoint
firewall on top of. Well, IPSO was made from FreeBSD so it followed that
the IP130 could run FreeBSD or any other free operating system.

Since I intend on using it as a home firewall I began with some of the
free firewall distros. I tried pfSense, Smoothwall, IPCop, EMBCop...none
worked. Those distros based on Linux simply wouldn't boot. The one BSD
based distro, pfSense, would page fault on boot. I then tried just
FreeBSD 6.2 but that page faulted also.

With some google searching I found out that FreeBSD 4.7 boots on a Geode
processor just fine, and that Monowall, a firewall/router distro, was
based on FreeBSD 4.7. I hadn't tried it before because it only comes as
an image file, not an ISO to download. But with some further google
searching and a Linux boot CD I was able to apply the image to the
IP130's hard drive.

The IP130 boots monowall very well and it works perfectly.

Nice.

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