SonicWall hardware: good for anything?

[Alan Johnson]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 7:54 PM, Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Alan Johnson <alan at datdec.com> wrote:
> > I've got 4 3060's and 2 2040's.  Decent hardware for firewalling ... but
> > the software sucks, IMHO.
>
>  Good to know SonicWall hasn't changed since I last encountered them (c.
> 2003).
>

That might just be about as old as this firmware is. =)


>
> > I'm wondering if I can get pfSense onto them ...
>
>  Many firewall appliances (the good ones, anyway) do the forwarding
> in custom ASICs.  They generally need highly proprietary software for
> that.  I dunno if what you have is those.
>

Do you figure such ASICs would get in the way of running other OSs or might
they happily sit idle without causing trouble?


>
> > There is a not-DB15 connector on the MB labled "VGA".  It looks like an
> > 8-pin-long floppy/IDE connector ...
>
>  Those are generally called "ribbon cable connectors" when they're
> not anything in particular.  :-)
>

Thank you!  I was drawing a blank trying to think of that.  Brain fart.


>   Standard VGA needs a minimum of 9 conductors (3 colors each with
> signal and ground, vert sync, horiz sync, sync ground) (the other 6
> are for DDC or not used).  So whatever that 8 pin connector is, it
> isn't standard VGA.  However, if you only need monochrome (and a
> firewall's debug port doesn't need color), you can drop two of the
> colors, bringing it down to 5 conductors.
>

To clarify, the ribbon cable connector it is 8x2 pins: 16 total.

  Good luck finding the pinout for that thing, though.  If I had to do
> it, I would get a VGA cable, cut an end off and fan it out, solder on
> 9 alligator clips, and start trial-and-error mix-and-match.  Someone
> with an oscilloscope (and who knew what to do with it) might be able
> to approach the problem more intelligently.
>

Yeah, that would make it not worth the effort right there. Fun project
perhaps, but not something I can spend the time on.

> Other than that, it looks like a pretty standard Intel-platform
> motherboard
> > with some extra on-board NICs.
>
>   That's interesting.  Can you post pics?
>

Well, I can start to feel myself getting into trouble for tossing around the
term "standard" too loosely again.  I'll see if I can get a few minutes to
put some out tomorrow if you promise not to be too harsh on me.  ;-)  I only
meant to imply that there is an Intel chip/chip-set on there, an Intel
processor, and some good-old DIMM slots.  Certainly a lot of common PC
components.
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