PPPoE worked first time with my broadband setup ( once I had an appropriate modem) along with all the other home networking bits that you would expect. One reboot later, and pfSense remained happy, and reported the new version of the BIOS was there. No scary messages appeared in the process, and I was met with: Verifying flash. I followed ‘Method 1’ as documented here. Yup! I'm running 4.11.0.6 on multiple devices. Is it safe? Well, if in doubt, ask Twitter…
Which version? 4.11.0.6 is the latest at the time of writing. I then realised that, duh, pfSense is running on FreeBSD which is more than capable of running flashrom directly. For the APU boards, however, there were various fixes since 4.0.7 that seemed pretty relevant - especially if you wanted to perform a re-install of anything without messing around with kernel and boot parameters.īut how? I didn’t at this point have a null-modem cable to control things when booting from a USB stick to perform the flashing procedure.
In general the rule is not to update your BIOS unless there is an actual reason to, due to the potential risk of bricking the device.
In fact, 4.0.7 was so old it didn’t even appear as a Legacy version on the PC Engines coreboot web pages. The Dashboard showed that the APU board was running a very old coreboot (BIOS). The system booted up into pfSense with no issues. One slight annoyance is that there is no power switch – as soon as the power cable is plugged in, the thing will start booting! Getting Flashy As the board pictures show, there are no cooling fans, so it is rigged for silent running. In terms of size, you are looking at something twice the width of a typical Raspberry Pi case. The kit arrived next day, which was wonderful service.
I had two die within a week which left a bit of a sour taste in the mouth. SD cards are just not that great when it comes to computer usage. (The system is running at around 430 Mb in use most of the time).
These are system boards designed for this sort of thing, complete with multiple Ethernet ports, decent amounts of RAM (2 gig upwards) and AMD G Series processors. Mainly as it only has one Ethernet port out of the box, and while there are methods to extend this, I wanted a piece of hardware that had what I needed ‘out of the box’ but was still minimalistic in nature.Įnter the PC Engines APU boards. While the Raspberry Pi, especially in its 4th incarnation, has a decent amount of power behind it, it’s not quite in the ballpark to be running pfSense. Security aside, I’m also a big fan of stats and pretty graphs, and these are quite simply hard to come by with some of the basic consumer broadband router solutions. This got me thinking about implementing a decent home network firewall solution, above and beyond the default one you get when running your average broadband router. I’ve recently been doing some more tinkering with the excellent Raspberry Pi devices, including setting up a home Pi-hole to assist with sending web adverts into a black hole.