Fixing a BSD firewall from 2004

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wove
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Fixing a BSD firewall from 2004

Post by wove »

So last night I get a call from a casual friend that has a bar and grill. He has some old setup and it crashed. Internet is down, gaming is down, credit card payments are down. He says his pfsense machine will not run and without it his business is crippled. Wants to know if I can fix the computer. He tells me it is running Windows ME.

I told him to drop if off after the place closes. The house is unlocked. I will leave the light on just set it in the front hall and I will look at it in the morning. This morning when I get up sure enough there is a black tower sitting on the floor. It will not start. Tore the whole thing apart. Fans were all frozen, enough dirt to fill a sandbox inside. Cleaned it up, replaced the fans, replaced the power supply.

Once I got it back together it fired up. The copyright on the BIOS was 2003, so maybe it did have ME. It has 128MB ram and a 233MHz Pentium 3 running on two 500MB drives in a mirrored raid. It boots up in FreeBSD 3(?) and it is running pfSense (1.2). I text him that that the computer is alive. He swings by picks me and machine up and we head to the bar and grill and plug it back into the system. When everything is done restarting, it is all working again.

He said he had it setup by some college kid in the computer science department and yeah it was a used computer back when setup. He said he had put it into service in 2004-2005 and it had been up and running since then. It is just amazing how rock solid BSD is. Reading the log after startup, it passed all its startup checks, so the old hardware was pretty solid as well. My guess is that with the failure of the fans it shutdown from over heating. I told him to replace it asap and I would not trust it at all, figure to have system replace within a week two at tops.

I got good money for the fix, he said with it down, he had no internet and no internal network and with both gone one may as well just close the doors.
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crosscourt
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Re: Fixing a BSD firewall from 2004

Post by crosscourt »

There are no Pentium 3 233mhz processors. It either has to be a Pentium 2 233mhz or an original Pentium MMX 233 mhz. There are also no Celeron 233mhz cpus . Did the cpu sit in a socket, or was it standing up in a slot 1?
Its not just BSD, older hardware was fantastically reliable and didnt suffer all the issues of modern hardware. Im typing on a 15 year old HP DC5700 and the board looks pristine.
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wove
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Re: Fixing a BSD firewall from 2004

Post by wove »

In honesty I just guessed at the type the log just reported running on i386 architecture at 233mhz and I guessed that Pentium 3 was about the right vintage:( I guess not.) The processor was either soldered or socketed on the MB with a small heat sink and fan.

What struck me as being very robust and reliable was not that it worked, but that it ran 24-7 365 for ~18 years. Power failures probably gave it a bit of rest as did down time to add updated network gear and reconfigure, but it is trivial compared to the time it was up. I think I need a good i5 and 16Gig of RAM, to get work done and this machine that is outclassed by Raspberry Pi ever made and it no doubt passes more data in a day than I create in a year, and it has done it for ~18 years, before it needed repair.
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crosscourt
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Re: Fixing a BSD firewall from 2004

Post by crosscourt »

More than likely it was a Pentium MMX 233mhz socketed cpu. I had a system with it till 2006 as the fire got it. All my antique systems were destroyed.
When I worked at the computer store we constantly saw systems coming in with problems but in our warehouse we had much older systems still running doing point work that were much like your experience. Its an amazing thing when you experience older hardware still churning away.
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