[Sidewinder] Booting a model D Sidewinder with serial console

[Sidewinder moderated discussion list]

Hi,

Check the BIOS settins and make sure you have enabled 'agent after reboot'
if I am not mistaken. There is a kowldgebase article abiut that. 
I ran into that as well on even bigger appliances. 
 Once enabled you see the F1,F2 and F3.

Cheers

Gerhard

Webwasher GmbH
Ohmstr. 4
85716 Unterschleissheim
Germany
Geschäftsführer: Mary Budge
Die Gesellschaft ist eingetragen beim Amtsgericht Paderborn (Sitz der
Gesellschaft) Nr. HRB 8307.

 -----Original Message-----
From: 	Sidewinder moderated discussion list
[mailto:sidewinder at adeptech.com]
Sent:	Friday, November 16, 2007 04:56 PM Central Standard Time
To:	Sidewinder moderated discussion list
Subject:	[Sidewinder] Booting a model D Sidewinder with serial
console

Hi, all!

Today one of my customers broke his Sidewinder 7 entirely by
installing 70003H04. I could not reconstruct what precisely
went wrong, but since we had a current desaster recovery
backup, I decided to re-image the system.

I found one minor thig that puzzled me quite a bit, though.

His firewall is a 110 D without graphics port - though the
VGA and keyboard logic is still there as you can tell watching
the kernel boot.

In our office I run a HA pair of 110 C, being mostly standard
Dell desktop PCs.

When I boot version 7 on my firewall, the first prompt looks
roughly like this:

Secure Computing
F1 Virtual CD
F2 Alternate System
F3 Operational System

(I may have the precise wording wrong, but you get the idea)

FreeBSD veterans will instantly recgnize the "booteasy" bootmanager.

If I'm not mistaken, ad0s2 and ad0s3 contain two complete Sidewinder
software installations, that are the fundament of the "rollback"
mechanism that we got in version 7. So I figure the roles of
"Alternate" and "Operational" system are switched with every patch
install that requires a reboot.

Now the puzzle: there is no such prompt at all on the freshly imaged
110 _D_, while - of course - the partition layout is identical to
my own system. It boots directly into the BTX bootloader of the
currently active partition.

I first noticed this when I tried to boot the "Alternate" system
after the customer broke his box. No prompt, no chance. I tried
changing the active partition with fdisk -a - no go. It came
up with ad0s3d for /usr every time and complained that this
filesystem was not repairable.

The system is running fine again now, at 70004, but the booteasy
prompt is still missing. I went as far as removing the hard disk,
connecting it to different computer and dd'ing /dev/zero to the
first couple of megs of the disk. Just to make really sure the
installer had to write a new partition table and MBR.

No "F1, F2, F3 ..."

Weird.

Any ideas? Well, first thing: can anyone having a 110 D at hand
confirm that there is no such boot manager, either?

Kind regards,
Patrick M. Hausen
Leiter Netzwerke und Sicherheit

P.S. Re-imaging was done with the virtual appliance for PXE installations.
-- 
punkt.de GmbH * Vorholzstr. 25 * 76137 Karlsruhe
Tel. 0721 9109 0 * Fax 0721 9109 100
info at punkt.de       http://www.punkt.de
Gf: Jürgen Egeling      AG Mannheim 108285
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