Nethsecurity won't boot for eval on old hardware

NethSecurity
1

Have I done something wrong?

I wrote to a usb stick and to a hard drive using a Ubuntu 22.04 machine copy and pasting from the installation page as root.

zcat nethsecurity-8-23.05.3-ns.1.1.0-x86-64-generic-squashfs-combined-efi.img.gz | dd of=/dev/sdc bs=1M iflag=fullblock status=progress oflag=direct

I tried to boot to 3 different Intel 64 bit machines with the stick and one of them with the HD.

Two of the Intel machines boot no problem to a Ubuntu 20.04 usb stick.

None of the machines will disclose the nethsecurity os in any way even though they see the Ubuntu stick and will boot to it just fine.

Screenshot from 2024-08-07 17-07-02
Screenshot from 2024-08-07 17-07-02952Ă—652 64.8 KB

2

This is strange,
the hardware support is quite wide :thinking:

Do you have any error at boot?
Is the USB stick you’re using for NethSecurity the same used for Ubuntu? (I just want to exclude a USB stick problem as happened to me a couple of times)

Also, you can search if someone else is using your hardware using this form: Hardware

3

It’s not booting.
The bios of the Atom 330 sees the Cruzer stick and it sees the hard drive I wrote Nethsecurity too as well, it just won’t boot to them.

I don’t see the any Atoms in the hardware list for openwrt. It’s likely all my old hardware is too old and everything else I have is in use.

Is there a recommended multiport mini pc without wifi for Nethsecurity, like a Protectli or Qotom or …

4

@fasttech

If you can grab yourself a second hand or new PCengines APU you should be fine off.
I’m using one for OpenWRT, the second box is being prepped for NethSecurity testing.

Different models are available, but I’m using the APU4d4.

  • Quad Core 1 GHZ AMD SoC
  • 4 GB RAM
  • 4 Intel 1 GBE NICs (Some models have 3).
  • Low Power consumption, no moving parts (quiet!).
  • Boots form a 120 GB mSATA SSD (Other sizes can be used) or USB 2/3

My 2 cents
Andy

See maybe here:

→ They ship almost anywhere, fast.

5

I’d say the Atom n330 CPI should work.
Probably the bios does not like the combined UEFI image used inside the USB.

As an alternative, if you can, you could try to write directly the disk bypassing the USB stick.

1 Like
6

I found this Atom 330
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/35641/intel-atom-processor-330-1m-cache-1-60-ghz-533-mhz-fsb.html
and this should work (x64 supported, not all Atoms do). However, some Atom families have issues with uEFI, which declare itself as 32 bit while actually are (and works) as 64bit.
I don’t actually know if this iteration (Atom 330 Diamondville) is among these

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7

As stated in my original post, I did write to and attempt to boot from spinning rust so I have a hd installed to the 330 with the Nsecurity img written to it that the 330 does not see, the bios does see the HD but will not try to boot to it.

I had tested a laptop as well, just to see if it would boot. It would not, but looking through the bios settings for the laptop last night I found it was set to legacy only boot and once I enabled uefi it booted to an opnsense img I wrote to another usb stick, when I tried that opnsense stick in the 330, the 330 wouldn’t see it, and last night I booted the original usb stick with the Nsecurity img in the laptop and am looking at Nsecurity right now on the laptop.

I don’t see any setting in the 330 bios re; uefi.

Is there an edit in the grub cfg I can make or a way of writing the img or any other way I can make a boot disk this 330 can see? I had actually used it for an ngfw for some time before I virtualized the ngfw.

If I can get the 330 to run the network’s firewall I could then free up a host and potentially begin to attempt the NS7 to 8 migration per my other post without buying new hardware.

Here’s the hd;

Screenshot from 2024-08-09 08-51-43
Screenshot from 2024-08-09 08-51-43952Ă—652 71.3 KB

8

Would you consider to test the install/image-writing of OpenWRT?
If the behavior is the same, there’s a possibility that the issue comes from the starting project.

1 Like
9

I looked into that last night.
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/uefi-bootable-image

I have wasted way too many hours on this. It appears the boards for both of my Atoms; 330 and 510 are bios only and as you can see in the above link openwrt gave up on bios long ago, they do offer legacy images for bios but I’m not looking to run openwrt. We should probably add to the Nsecurity install docs that support is only for eufi.

10

I cannot agree more.
Documentation is lacking on more than one “blocking” points.

11

Thanks for taking extra time for testing.

I have to disagree: current image can correctly handle both UEFI and non-UEFI bios.
We ship machines with non-UEFI bios and it works good.
Also, all the development is done on legacy bios virtual machines.

Sot it seems to me a very specific hardware problem.
Probably, it can be fixed with a dedicated legacy bios image but I’m not sure it worth trying for such old hardware.

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