[stephenw10]

It will only boot a kernel compiled for the "IXDP425 Development Platform", I'm unfamiliar with those devices are they reported as that platform?
Also without a NAND driver of some sort I think we will still effectively be running a ramdisk image. Although we could load that image from NAND in Redboot I don't we could access it once the kernel had booted.
However I'm way out of my depth here so I could be wrong!

Steve

[stephenw10]

I see from another post the Avila reports:

[Sash]

but u used an current build?

[stephenw10]

I used what was the latest trunk of Openwrt for my first image back in March and the 10.03 stable branch for the image recently.
I'm just saying that I thought any dd-wrt build would exepect to mount the root file system from an mtd partition and it's not going to be there, no?
That's why I had to use a ramdisk image.

Steve

[Skulldice]

Hey Guys,

first - sorry for my English (I'm German).
I have a WatchGuard Firebox Edge x10e-W.

I know, that the DD-WRT is WORK IN PROGRESS.

Perhaps I can help you - testing Firmware or something like that. Is there a working firmware jet?

Greetz
Skulldice

[stephenw10]

No further news I'm afraid.
At this point it needs some coding work and that's beyond my skills.

Steve

[mhedhli]

Any progress on this? It be great to make these old fireboxes useful for once.

[stephenw10]

Not from me I'm afraid.
In order to test this any further we need a DD-wrt image that is compiled with the correct platform name (Machine: Intel IXDP425 Development Platform) and that expects a root file system mounted from ram or NFS. All the images currently available expect to mount root from flash and that is not possible here since the majority is NAND.
With that image we can either/both network boot the image or load the image into and out of the NAND flash via the existing RedBoot tools at boot time.
Once that is done there will be other hardware not working. In my tests with the OpenWRT image I could not setup the Marvell switch IC which is needed to get a network connection.
If you have any ideas I'd be happy to try it.

Steve

[Sash]

i spoke to brainslayer and he is not willing to do a port. to much work (caused by the nand flash) for a eol cpu.

[stephenw10]

Thanks for asking anyway.
I guess they are getting a bit old these days. When they were current they have very nice specs, 128MB ram and 64MB rom compared well to other SOHO devices with 16 and 4MB!
However it's now possible to get similar specs in a router with a far faster CPU and gigabit lan and 802.11N etc.

Bare in mind that because of the large ram size it's possible to use the NAND just to store the image. Loading it into ram from a RedBoot script. There is a 1MB standard flash chip to store the config. You wouldn't necessarily have to deal with NAND in DD-WRT at all.

Steve

[Sash]

i have also one lying around ....collecting dust

to bad but this is life

[bitknipser]

I am just digging this old Fred out of his grave

Probably its time to bring a little live back to this topic.

I am not a specialist for Watchguard fireboxes, but also have got some in my hands and like to get more out of them.

What I know is that Fireboxes have two, what I will call, "run level"
Normally the system boots up with the Sys-A partition.
When set to factory defaults the system also has a partition called Sys-B

This Sys-B can be loaded via TFTP back into the system. Probably it is possible to inject some useful code and programs into this partition

What you have to have is the following.
Go to ftp://ftp.watchguard.com
Login with WgSoftware/Current$oftware1

Then goto
Software/Diagnostic Utilities/Firebox X Edge eSeries/

There you will find some interesting things:
A file called rootfs.sysb.gz. When unpacked you will find a file called rootfs.sysb.img.
This Image is a 16MB big image of a Linux ext2 file system. I have put this on a small CF Card and mounted it on a Linux system.
I added a "ls -lR" output of this partition as an text attachment.

In this ftp directory there is also a file called edge_diagnostic_tool.pdf.

There is described how this Sys-B can be reflashed via tftp onto the Firebox.

What do you think: Would it be possible to use this information for injecting something useful onto the firebox ?

Best regards

[code2K]

hello,

i have been following the posts here for a while and been experimenting with my X10ew.
the 1st thing i wanted to do is simply load an image and see what is "does/shows" but this fails nomather what image i load into the device (mine of those posted here).
i must have overseen something very basic as i am still novice in the process of understanding how the whole boot process works.

any thoughts?
thanks !



Password > F5BA25AB44724fb5A6DD37554809CE34
(...)

load -r -b 0x1000000 zImage
(...Raw file loaded...)

cksum
(...)

go 0x1000000
(nothing)

[stephenw10]

Hi. Good to get some further opinions on this.

@bitknipser
I don't think you can easily modify and upload any software to the box since the Watchguard box will not allow you flash anything that doesn't have the correct checksum/security validation. Though I have never tried doing that with SysB. You would normally only ever use SysB in order to recover SysA if it has become corrupt. I, and others, have certainly tried to upload various images via a SysB boot and it fails the validation check, unsurprisingly.
That doesn't really matter since we can upload anything you want via Redboot.

@code2K
Hmm, odd. What image are you trying?
I did find it wasn't reliable. Sometimes it would boot other times it wouldn't but I think it always gave some error message.

The problem we have here is that because most of the flash is NAND it will be inaccessible from DD-WRT once it has booted. The 1MB or NOR flash will be accessible though so you will be able to save config files etc. So this is not necessarily a problem. Redboot contains the utilities to access the NAND flash so the system image can be stored there and loaded into RAM at boot. Since there is a lot of RAM that should be OK.
Alternatively we need a NAND flash driver in order to run DD-WRT/OpenWRT normally. If you look at the Watchguard boot messages it looks like they wrote their own driver or customised it at least.

Steve

[stephenw10]

Hmm, having reviewed the diag tool it looks like it simply interacts with redboot via the serial console and provides a friendly interface. That does mean that it may indeed to possible to upload anything you like as SysB and have it handle the perilous RedBoot Nand commands!
More interestingly though is that the ftp archive contains the complete GPL source release.

Steve