[rescue] Watchguard Firebox II

[mjbraun at enteract.com]

How very odd; I havn't been paying much attention to Rescue lately since I 
resubscribed (what with being unemployed and all) yet I just happened to read 
the body of your message and said "Hmmm, that sounds familiar". Then I checked 
the subject and was stunned, given that I was up till around 3am last night 
working on much the same issue!

I have a CAIS Miniserver that was graciously donated by Mr. Tom Gallaway (also 
of Rescue) which I discovered was actually running a Watchguard motherboard 
(pull off the CAIS sticker on the MB and voila!), though it had OpenBSD rather 
than Linux. Well, there are a few minor differences (it has an IDE header, and 
one of the serial ports points up rather than out (the power supply has a built 
in UPS so an internal serial cable gives info from that) but otherwise it's the 
same thing!

Here's an internal shot: http://www.dcllabs.net/watchguard.html
(not mine, an actual Firebox)

So, I've been doing some research: firstly, it will attempt to boot from a SCSI 
drive if you have one installed and configured. I slapped in an Adaptec 2940UW  
with an old linux drive in it, and it got to lilo and began to boot before 
crashing (it was a custom kernel for a SMP PPro box).

You can hook up a video card and see the output (it's a Phoenix PicoBIOS 4.0 
Release 6.0) but you'll either have to do some soldering or, if you have one 
handy, use something like this (http://www.compute-aid.com/pciraiser2.html). 
You're still without a Keyboard (the important part) but you can see some of 
the boot messages and the sad "Operating System Not Found" message.

The board itself is a custom job, manufactured by Smart Modular Technologies 
(http://www.smartm.com/main/index.cfm). Strangely, they make no mention of MB 
manufacture on their site, but a Watchguard "s00per sekr3t" filing document 
(http://witsoundview.com/ipo_details/WGRD2/WGRD2.pdf) says:

"We currently outsource all hardware manufacturing and assembly for our Firebox 
II product lines to two companies in California: Smart Modular Technologies, 
Inc., our motherboard manufacturer, and Streamlined Electronics Manufacturing, 
our final assembly house. The motherboard manufacturer designed and 
manufactures the motherboard to our specifications. The manufacturer may 
terminate the agreement for breach or insolvency of WatchGuard. For our Firebox 
SOHO and Firebox Telecommuter product lines, we currently outsource all 
hardware manufacturing and assembly to Productivity Enhancement Products, Inc. 
in California."

(In the upper right hand corner of the MB, it has the Smart name and, in my 
case, the model number PCBWCHREV2).

I've been in contact with Watchguard already, and someone is hopefully going to 
dig up some technical documents. Smart is on a skeleton crew for this week 
(holidays and all), but I submitted an email and I'll be following up next 
Monday.

I'll share whatever I can find!


> On Sat, 23 Nov 2002 08:31:11 -0600, Steve Hatle wrote:
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
> >Behalf Of Dan Sikorski
> >Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 10:21 PM
> >To: rescue at sunhelp.org
> >Subject: Re: [rescue] Watchguard Firebox II
> >
> >
> >>Yeah, i think at least some of 'em have 200mhz pentiums, but i know
> >>they
> >>had 300mhz models, probably amd.
> >
> >>Was it a PCMCIA flash card? or something else?
> >
> >Nope - there are PCMCIA cards "for expansion" but it looks like
> >soldered on
> >flash on the MB, if I know what I'm looking at.
> 
> Atmel part? Probably a J-lead case with an "F" somewhere in the part number.
> :)
> 
> >>Well, the first thing would be to find out what chipset the
> >>ethernet
> >>interfaces use, that's probably the biggest thing to worry about.
> >>My
> >>guess would be an intel chipset.
> >
> >>Did it have an IDE or floppy interface?
> >
> >It's still open on my desk, I'll check it out on Monday and let you
> >know
> >what I find. I didn't see any headers that looked IDE or floppyish,
> >but I'll
> >confirm.
> >
> >The way to do it might be to update the flash with the new OS image
> >through
> >the managment software, but how you would get such image built is
> >beyond me.
> 
> Could be somebody's standard mobo with a non-standard BIOS. If you can find
> the original part number, there's a chance you might be able to flash a
> standard BIOS to it.


-------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/