Jetway J7F2 Four LAN Mini-ITX for pfSense

For quite a while I was running m0n0wall on an old dell laptop with two NICs. This worked out pretty well because the laptop had a built-in screen, keyboard, and battery backup of sorts. It was also fairly portable. At some point I decided I wanted to do a bit more with my firewall and move to more powerful hardware. In particular, I wanted to try out pfSense, a m0n0wall fork. pfSense contains a package management system that allows you to install a wide variety of services including: Snort, Squid, FreeSWITCH, OpenBGPD, to name a few. I'll return to these in subsequent posts. I also needed more interfaces to be able to properly segregate my wireless network from my wired network.

I've been a big fan of the smaller form factor x86 machines for a while. Serapeum was built on a MicroATX form factor as well as my current desktop system. µATX is great for smaller desktop machines but is a bit too large for a firewall solution.

Mini-ITX seemed like the perfect option. I selected the Jetway J7F2 board with a 1.5Ghz Via C7 processor. Two compelling reasons for selecting this board were the Padlock engine, which provides hardware RNG, AES, and hashing acceleration, and support for daughter cards. Some quick OpenSSL benchmarks using the various engines provided these results:

cryptodev kilobytes per second:

type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes

aes-256-cbc 10166.19k 10492.00k 10832.45k 10520.09k 10871.68k

padlock kilobytes per second:

type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes

aes-256-cbc 69552.53k 221044.97k 475699.68k 662806.69k 745178.49k

The padlock hardware engine provides a 6850% increase in AES 256 encryption over the software based cryptodev. It peeks at about 5.7 gigabits per second. Cryptodev only achieves 85 megabits per second.

Summary of build hardware:
Jetway J7F2 VIA C7 1.5Ghz
Jetway AD3RTLANG 3 port GigaLAN daughter card
Corsair 1GB DDR2 533
Transcend 4GB CF 300x
M200 Enclosure
PicoPSU-120

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GJ8018LCD : My Latest Portable SMD BGA Reworks Station

My latest SMD BGA portable reworks station with LCD display another comparison with SAIKE 8858.

Description :

• This product is yet another innovative industry technology breakthrough that bypassing the traditional diaphragm pump air supply and transformer power supply
• And the use of LCD digital display hot air temperature, and its sophisticated design, superior quality

Technical parameters:

• Model GJ8018LCD
• Operating voltage AC220V Operating Current 2.5A
• Power consumption: 450W, Hot air temperature：Condition temperature 450 ℃ (Max.)

Features:

1. Beautiful shape, easy to use and carry space saving operation
2. The quality of imported motor and heating elements, natural and gentle wind, air heat distribution. Easy to adjust the operator to precisely control the temperature and air volume.
3. LCD display hot air temperature, digital thermostat, the operator uses an intuitive, blowing welding handy
4. No way solder contact pads may dispense parts displacement and thermal shock
5. Welding QFP and SOP type IC, welding and soldering can be selected according to requirements of different nozzle
6. Suitable for most surface mount soldering and rework parts, such as: SOIC, CHIP, QFP, PLCC, BGA, etc.
7. For desoldering various shielding box cover board
8. Shrink Heat Shrink Tubing, PVC film and polyethylene materials with metal connections

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SAIKE 8858 : My Portable SMD BGA Rework Station

The SAIKE 8858 is a Portable SMD/BGA Rework Station, can be as such Hot Air, Blower, Solder, Heat Gun.

Description:

1.  Automatic mode
2. Microcomputer control automatically, automatic thermostat, standby,warming up rapidly, temperature stability, accuracy is ± 2 ;
3. Replacing heating core, hot helical structure; adjustable temperature is 100 -480 , it is suitable for general / lead-free soldering;
4. Replaceable large, medium and small nozzles, strong non-noise blowers, rotary air output; adjustable air pressure is 3mph-10mph 99 class, it can meet different welding requirements;
5. Intelligent software design, high-temperature alarm, automatic fault detection and alarm, automatic standby overtime;
6. Highly efficient switching power supply, power supply control system is integration design;
7. The supply voltage is 220V
8. Long-life heating batteries, vulnerable parts can be removable and replacement, reduce the cost of users;
9. Small size, low power, easy to use, easy to operate.

Specification:

• Voltage: 220V
• Power frequency: 50-60Hz
• Power: 100-320W
• Temperature: 100-480, analyze temperature: 1
• Air pressure: 3-10mph,, 99 grade
• Mode: automatically
• Display: digital tube/3
• Dimension: 128mm×54mm×32mm
• Air output: 120L/min (The MAX.)

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How to write pfsense image onto a SSD for fast installation

One question we have received since the how to build a pfsense box piece is how to quickly install a pfsense image onto a SSD. Recently we sent three Dell C6100 XS23-TY3 servers to our collocation facility but had not yet decided upon a few software items. We used the three day transit and racking time to do some basic software installation. One of these tasks included two instances of pfsense on SSD installations which we prepped offsite. When it was time to do the final installation, each pfsense node received its SSD and the units booted right up. As a result we did a quick guide on the installation after we confirmed it worked perfectly.

Copying pfsense onto a SSD

The first step in the copy process is to install the drive in the physical machine. Although we have done this for a few different SSD implementations, we are actually using an iSCSI volume setup on a Synology DS1812+ that was mounted locally. Disk management shows the following drive ready to use in the system.

The next step is to get physdiskwrite for Windows here. We are using Windows 8 Pro and thus are using the PhysGUI.exe to make the process a bit easier. One major note about this step is that since one will be making major changes to disks, one will want to run the program as administrator.

Once the PhysGUI is loaded, one will see a list of drives installed in the system. In this case we are going to use PHYSICALDRIVE5 because we are going to attach that to an iSCSI boot machine soon. For the purpose of today’s guide, we are going to use it just as we would the OCZ Agility 3 or any other SSD (we used Intel SSDs for our colocation.) PhysGUI is not an English utility so it is slightly less intuitive for native English speakers.

After selecting the correct disk, right click and open the pfsense image that you want to flash on the SSD. For this we are using the pfsense 2.0.2 stable release and are using the 4GB NanoBSD VGA version. You can read more about the versions and download here. With a SSD, we are much less sensitive to size than we are on a small USB flash drive.

Once clicking on open, and since we are using a 4GB installation, we are asked to confirm that we want to pick a capacity over 2GB for the pfsense installation.

At this point one will get a confirmation about destroying the current content on the disk and overwriting it with the disk image. Beware – you can lose data doing this so triple check before proceeding.

Once this is done, it will generally take a few seconds to write everything out. Going back into disk management one will see the image is written to the SSD.

One tip here is that you can use this to do extreme over provisioning. A 60GB drive that is brought down to 8-16GB will see considerably higher write endurance as compared to a fully provisioned drive. This can be important if one is trying to write logs to the drive.

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TM Innacomm ADSL-INNATECH-W7100N Username Password

Telekon Malaysia (TM), The Innacomm ADSL-INNATECH-W7100N is a new modem replacing Innacomm W3400V6. The modem login ID/username/password is already printed in the manual guideline. This new modem wireless router all in one residential gateway is unique due to its modem password architecture is the last-4 digit modem CPE MAC Address ID.

Here's how it is look like, the TM Innacomm ADSL-INNATECH-W7100N Username Password

Modem Login: tmadmin
Modem Pass : Adm@****

Hint: **** is the last-4 digit modem CPE MAC Address ID (e.g: XXXXXXXX1234, so CPE MAC ID is 1234)

Modem Pass: Adm@1234

You can refer also to TM ADSL RIGER DB120-WL Default Username Password both are identical.

Different modem has different CPE MAC Address ID. But don't worry, you can refer sticker info at the back of the modem every time you forgot or lost the modem box.

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