zeta (iBase FWA6304-D25)
Summary
Fanless Quad NIC + Wifi system. With NIC bypass feature.
Frustrating box. OpenBSD's EFI is broken on it. VGA header doesn't seem to work (or I mis[wired,configured] it).
Notes
- Mini-PCIE slot is USB only
Hardware
| Make | iBase |
| Year | 2012 |
| Model | FWA6304-D25 |
| Chassis | iBase Fanless |
| Power Supply | 12V 3.33A |
| Processor | Intel Atom D2550 |
| Memory | 4GB DDR3 |
| Ports | 4x RJ-45 LAN |
| USB A 2.0 | |
| RJ-45 Serial | |
| 2x RP-SMA Wifi | |
| Graphics | Intel GMA 3150 |
| Storage | 80GB SATA Intel SSD 320 |
| Int. Peripherals | 4x Intel 82583V Gigabit Ethernet (ports 1/2 have bypass) |
| Mini-PCI PW-MN561 (Atheros AR9223) 802.11n Wifi | |
| Ext. Peripherals | |
| Dimensions | |
| Length/Depth | |
| Width | |
| Height/Thickness | |
| Weight | kg (lbs oz) |
Software
| Operating System | |
| Unique applications |
Links
- [[][]]
Log
Getting an OS on this poor thing
Despite the VGA header on board I've never seen a display out of it. I've checked and double checked the pinout for the adapter I made, but it doesn't work. So I resort to serial console.
- OpenBSD. Broken EFI, bootloops. I tried a snapshot BOOTX64.EFI to no avail. Always "
(entry point at 0x1001000)" and reboot. - Debian AMD64. Kernels fail to load. I could get grub to come up just fine. Occasionally I'd get two messages from the kernel before the machine would just sit.
- Tried booting a bunch of old CDs (netbsd, minix, ubuntu, debian 7) for fun, but none were set up for serial consoles.
- Finally built a Debian 11 i386 installer with 686+PAE kernel.
I used https://github.com/ffries/Debian-installer-with-serial-console to build the image which is just a handful of configuration files and a script to run simple-cdd. Modify the dist in the shell script, and all files in profiles. It works well.
Grub install failed. Things are buggy. I couldn't get grub to install from a chroot even. May need to revert to non-EFI install.
Gave up on EFI. Manually booted the non-EFI installer from BIOS. Had to resort to manually blanking the drive because I entered 100% which broke partman when it tried to write that.
Finally a working install