that left my old one for parts and pretty much the only thing of any value to me was the hard drive. mine has a zif/lif connector which i hadn’t ran into before but after doing a little looking around, i found that you could find fairly inexpensive enclosures on ebay (search for ’1.8 ZIF LIF external usb’). from what i understand, some ipod hard drives are zif and others are ide. just make sure you know which one you own before ordering. the person i bought mine from on ebay had both types available.

1.8″ ide drive	1.8″ zif drive

the case that i bought is a hitachi mobile disk case. there really isn’t anything special about it as it is simply a plastic case with a circuit board which converts the connector to mini usb. i purchased it solely based on the plain look and small size. it is only about the size of a credit card (just slightly bigger) which is about 1/2 to 2/3 the size of a standard 2.5″ laptop hard drive in an external enclosure. the plastic seems to be much more sturdy than that of my 2.5″ laptop enclosure which needs replacing badly. that is how the whole idea of looking for an 1.8″ enclosure came to mind. if you can help it, i would try to keep the screwing and unscrew of the case to a minimum to prevent stripping out the plastic threads in the hole as they tend to easily break on enclosures. also do not over tighten them as that will definitely cause damage to the holes.

the case doesn’t come with instructions but installation was a easy and took about 2 minutes. if you have the ability to disassemble an ipod, you will easily be able to figure out how a zif connector works. if you don’t know how to disassemble your dead ipod, just do a quick google search and you’ll find plenty of assistance. the only reason the installation took 2 minutes was because the screws were so small, they were difficult to handle. once it was all buttoned up, i just plugged it in, reformatted the drive and it worked like a charm.

yesterday i received my soekris engineering net4801-60 in the mail. the unit seems to be in good condition and even came with a compactflash card and vpn1411 card which i won’t end up using. i will most likely end up selling the vpn card as i don’t use my smoothwall to create a vpn and the smoothwall os does not have support built into the kernel for a vpn card such as this anyway.

as you can see, it really is just a basic computer. today i received the last parts that i will be needing for this project. they are the hard drive mounting kit and the power supply. i purchased these directly from soekris engineering. in part 1, i prepared the smoothwall install on a 2.5″ 60GB laptop hard drive. the next step is to install the hard drive on the mounting kit inside the unit. the hard drive connects using four mounting screws on the bottom of the drive. the mounting kit is connected to by unscrewing the four screws which secure the net4801 to the case and placing the mounting bracket on top of the board’s mounting holes and reinserting the screws into the mounts.

now that the hard drive is connected and the unit is closed back up, it is time to test the unit. in order to do that, i am going to fire up minicom on my server which is connected via null modem serial cable to the net4801 and listening on com1. if the unit does not show any activity in the minicom windows, you might want to check out the manual from the soekris download page to make sure that you have configured minicom to use the default settings (19200 baud, 8 databits, no parity, 1 stop bit, no flow control). here is the boot screen that you should see upon powering up the unit:

comBIOS ver. 1.31  20070408  Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Soekris Engineering.

net4801

0256 Mbyte Memory                        CPU Geode SC1100 267 Mhz 

Pri Mas  IC25N060ATMR04-0                LBA Xlt 1024-255-63  58605 Mbyte

Slot   Vend Dev  ClassRev Cmd  Stat CL LT HT  Base1    Base2   Int
-------------------------------------------------------------------
0:00:0 1078 0001 06000000 0107 0280 00 00 00 00000000 00000000
0:06:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000E101 A0000000 10
0:07:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000E201 A0001000 10
0:08:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000E301 A0002000 10
0:18:2 100B 0502 01018001 0005 0280 00 00 00 00000000 00000000
0:19:0 0E11 A0F8 0C031008 0117 0280 08 38 00 A0003000 00000000 11

 1 Seconds to automatic boot.   Press Ctrl-P for entering Monitor.

on minicom, the unit shows a ram count and then after a few seconds proceeds to boot. due to the configuration of the kernel smoothwall uses, you can’t see the boot messages (and we didn’t set lilo up to show them even if the kernel supported it). once the unit is ready, it will display a login prompt:

smoothwall
Connected on ttyS0 at 19200 bps
smoothwall login:

from there you need to login using ‘root’ and the password you set up in the initial configuration. once you login, you will need to reconfigure your smoothwall’s network settings. you do this by running the ‘setup’ command. on the setup screen, you will want to choose ‘networking’, then ‘network configuration type’. on the next screen, choose “green + orange + red”. you will then want to choose ‘drivers and card assignments’. then choose ‘ok’ to change settings then choose ‘probe’. as it detects the network cards, set them as green, then orange, and red (the order is important). green (internal) is eth0, orange (dmz) is eth1, and red (external) is eth2. make sure the address settings are still correct for your network and your external network is set properly for your ISP.

once that is done, i connect network cables to the net4801 and then reboot the unit. once it reboots, you might want to check to make sure all of your interfaces have ip addresses and have been assigned correctly. if they have not, you will want to re-run setup and check for errors in your configuration. from there, i was able to connect to the web interface and configure my smoothwall. now i am up and running behind my net4801. from looking at my mrtg graphs, i can get an idea of how much less power the net4801 uses. my estimated runtime on battery went from ~30 to ~38 minutes.

and that’s pretty much about it for the setup. if you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments section.

• soekris engineering net4801-60
• soekris engineering 2.5″ hdd mounting kit
• soekris engineering power supply
• 2.5″ ide hard drive
• 10 foot serial null modem cable

since i already have the hard drive, i can do some of the prep work by installing smoothwall. i am using an old laptop to install the os to the hard drive. luckily linux is much less picky than windows about changing hardware after installing. i downloaded and burnt a copy of the latest smoothwall 3.0 sp1. installing smoothwall is about as straight forward as things come. just follow the steps on the screen until you get to the “Network configuration menu”. since we currently do not have the correct network cards in the computer, this part is going to be overwritten later.

just leave the current config as “GREEN (RED is modem/ISDN)”. choose “Drivers and card assignments”. allocate the nic to the green interface. then go to “Address settings” and give the green interface a valid IP address on your subnet. once that is completed, choose done. on the “Section menu” screen, just choose finished as we do not want to set up a modem that we actually won’t be using. then just complete the setup by entering your passwords and reboot.

when your smoothwall boots, go ahead a login using “root” and the password that you provided. we need to make a few configuration changes since the net4801 only uses serial console for video output. first, we need to edit ‘/etc/inittab’. once finished, your inittab should look like this:

id:3:initdefault:

l0:0:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc.halt halt
l6:6:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc.halt reboot

si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

# Trap CTRL-ALT-DELETE
ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -h now

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1
#2:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty2
#3:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty3
#4:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty4
#5:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty5
#6:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty6
s0:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L -f /etc/issueserial 19200 ttyS0 vt100
~:S:wait:/bin/bash

the line in italics ‘s0:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L -f /etc/issueserial 19200 ttyS0 vt100‘ is what we are adding. this enables the serial console at the baud rate of 19200 (the default for the net4801). the lines in bold are ones that we should comment out. there is no point in running multiple virtual terminals if we aren’t going to use them. they will just use resources since this box is headless but we are leaving one just in case it is needed in a recovery scenario.

next we need to create an ‘/etc/issueserial’ file:

smoothwall
Connected on \l at \b bps

next, we will want to create an ‘/etc/securetty’ file to allow root to login from the serial console:

ttyS0
tty1
tty2
tty3

in my next article, i am going to continue by talking about how to reconfigure the smoothwall setup to accept the new hardware of the net4801 but i will do so when i actually have the hardware on hand later this week.

continued in part 2

this is basically a 586 class pc that runs headless and uses a serial console for access. i thought about buying one directly from the manufacturer but then i saw the prices and they seemed more expensive (new units start at $213.00) than i wanted for such a small project. luckily i was able to find a used unit that i bought on ebay for $96. not only did this cost less than half of the price of a new unit, but it was a *-60 model instead of the *-40 they are selling now (266 mhz proc vs 233 mhz, 256mb of ram vs 128mb).

along with the unit itself, i purchased a 2.5″ hdd mounting kit since i didn’t want to go with a compactflash solution and i already have an extra 2.5″ ide hdd. hopefully i should receive everything sometime next week. i haven’t used any devices that use a serial console since i worked with cisco appliances in college but i ran a trial run of how i would install everything in vmware and it seemed to go easy enough. i’ll do a more detailed breakdown of how to install an os on a unit that is headless and has no optical drive for installation once i have everything on hand.