General purpose input/output Interrupt pins in desktop PCs?

[nctnico]

I think I hinted towards a job opening in the past which involves such projects... 

[cdev]

The hardware I am using is a repurposed top brand firewall appliance. There are lots of them being taken out of service and loaded with software like pfsense. Thats what I have got. I know it must be based on a commercial motherboard, probably Intel. What I would like to do is be able to access and boot arbitrary boot images on USB disks to install otherOS's than the FreeBSD-based firewall that it came loaded with, which is proving to be difficult to replace. I am going to try removing the BIOS battery for a length of time and see if that allows me to boot another image and install another OS. Its worth a try. I suspect the original motherboard is an Intel one, maybe a special order custom MB. It has a 2.66 MB 4 core LGA773 CPU and 8 gigabit NICs plus an expansion slot which can be used to add 2 10 GBps NICs. (probably mellanox) The machine uses a server chassis and it weighs quite a bit. And as I was saying I hope to be able to access the serial port so as to get precise timing. I paid around $100 for it and it seems pretty new.










it has a 2.6 GHz CPU It also has an interesting LCD which is for initial configuration.. I'd like to find out which HW manufacturer's board is used in it,  because there is an awful lot of server hardware there which looks like it probably supports interesting applications. It has an internal SSD disk. And they seem to be available cheap on the used market. At the very least the 8 port gigabit lan is unusual and nice to have.. Its an ideal firewall box.
Currently I am trying to figure out how to boot an arbitrary OS image of my choice.The bios appears to be locked .  It just wants to boot the BSD firewall distro every time its booted. Even if I stick with it, I would still like to put a fresh install on the box.

Jumping in here...

1) do you wish to build a product to sell?

2) on serial / parallel ports - our company has designed and built these adapters for the past 30+ years. For pci ? pcie bus? EPP1.7? EPP1.9? PS2?

3) be aware that on a protected operating system such as windows 10, etc. - you will need a kernel mode driver to read/write to the respective serial or parallel port.

We can show you how to use a freeware kernel mode driver to perform this task. Did this recently last December for HP to allow for in-system programming of the microwire eeprom on Windows 10.

Shout back if we understand your requirement. The idea of USB is also valid but understand that using the parallel port is still much faster due to the overhead latency on the USB interface.

A possible work around if using USB is to allow for the external USB device to sample your signal / buffer the data and then offload to the host. That is, much like the FX2LP by Cypress or their USB 3.0 USB interface, etc. Then you will need to use USB APIs to chat with the USB function.

A few options here...but parallel port is very well documented already.

[nctnico]

IMHO you are going to need a steep learning curve into protected BIOSses. Removing the battery is not going to help.

Besides that it would be useful to just name the brand & model of the hardware you are using and posts some photos so people can identify headers with possible I/O ports. Without that info the only answers you'll get are highly academic because they aren't targeted at the actual hardware you have. It is even possible that your machine isn't compatible with an off-the-shelve OS.

[cdev]

it's a Checkpoint CPAP-SG4800-NGTX-HPP-HA-LCM with a 2.66 GHz CPU and 8 gb memory and 8x1gb nic and it's a firewall network appliance.

When it boots, I am unable to boot off of USB sticks made in the usual way.. (dd if=file.iso of=usbstick.img)

however I can run the firewall os which is based on freebsd. the vendor was able to load pfsense onto it.

[nctnico]

What makes you think this thing is compatible with a standard PC?

[cdev]

Other people are able to load x86_64 based OS's like freeBSD/pfsense onto them, but perhaps there is some magic incantation they know but I don't, yet. Or perhaps the bootable images I have made as I have always made them before, are missing something besides the bootable flag and a correct checksum.

I only paid around $100 for my server. Which seems very cheap for such an obviously useful router platform that's overbuilt. The intel NICs it contains are supposed to be the best for networking research. Lowest latency.

[nctnico]

For $100 (or even less) you can buy an ex-lease workstation which can run any PC compatible OS. Quad port Intel network cards aren't expensive either. IMHO you have bought a piece of boutique hardware for way too much money.

Why didn't you try to re-create the steps other people have taken to install different software? Given it is a firewall you very likely need factory signed software to get it to install in order to make sure the device can not be compromised by third parties even if they have physical access to the device. Chances are high it is only useful for its intended purpose: a firewall. I would not buy such a specialist piece of hardware.