tech.sweetnam.eu

Way back towards the end of August I inherited some fairly half decent equipment. Among them were two Symantec  5420 Security Appliances. I took them despite not knowing what it was that I was going to do with them. After a while I simply forgot about them until I decided yesterday to do something.

As the licenses had expired they weren’t much use as a security appliance so first things first was to take the cover off and have a gander inside. As I suspected an €8,000 from Symantec would of course be made from the cheapest parts available. The motherboard was from a company I had never heard of in all my years called iWill. Any references on the web point to them no longer existing. The CPU is a 2Ghz Celeron and it had 512MB RAM and a 40GB Maxtor hard disk. Connectivity wise there are 6 10/100Mbit Intel ethernet ports, two USB and one RS-232 ports. Inside on a riser board is a PCI slot however fitting a normal PCI card such as a display adapter s out of the question as the IDE cable would block even the shortest ones and besides, VGA cards are not supported! In the second IDE slot is a 16MB SSD.

So what was I going to do to get a new OS up and running on it? I came across a forum post from a guy who managed to get pfsense (FreeBSD) installed on it but unfortunately his instructions were a bit lacking. Out of curiosity I hooked a console cable up to the RS-232 port and opened a terminal where I was quite pleased to be greeted by a login prompt. I logged in using the username admin with the password I got from the LED panel on the front and lo and behold I was in a root shell. I guessed that Symantec’s software probably ran on one of the BSD’s or Linux from experience with Nokia Checkpoint which ran NetBSD I think.

Anyway I guessed correctly, the 5420 was running RedHat Linux 7.1. From the console I was able to garner a bit more about the hardware. In addition to the basic stuff I mentioned earlier there is a Broadcom Cryptographic Accelerator CPU on board. But back to my immediate problem. How to get another OS on it. After pondering for a few moments I decided to try and see if taking the disk out and sticking it into a spare PC and setting it up from there would work. I dusted off my trusty Optiplex Gx1 circa 1999 and proceeded to install Ubuntu 9.10 on the disk.

Before I stuck the disk back in the 5420 I made sure that I could access a shell via console cable. Thankfully there is some excellent documentation on the Ubuntu help site and in no time I was able to access the Dell via console cable and have access to the Grub boot menu on boot up as well.

Back into the 5420 did the disk go, console cable hooked up, terminal open and time to power up. To my absolute delight there was the Grub boot menu. I hit enter and up it loaded. Perfect! Except for one thing. I had no network access. Half way through diagnosing this the whole thing just froze on me so I rebooted. Not long after rebooting it froze again. It was then I remembered that the guy who installed pfsense on his one mentioned problems with ACPI.

Unfortunately as it would freeze up so quickly I was unable to fix it from a terminal so I had no other choice but to take the disk out and shove it back into the Dell again. Ubuntu 9.10 has a lot of things moved about and the new version of Grub had me a bit confused for a while but finally I got ACPI disabled and everything is working perfectly.

Being headless they aren’t much good for anything other than possibly their original intention as a security appliance. However I decided to set up one of them as a dedicated monitoring server running ntop and Munin. For that it is absolutely perfect!