smoothwall installation issue

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 06:29:01AM +0300, William Muriithi wrote:
> I did type in the tag number and yes its a 200. Something must have
> however changed in this hardware. Before ordering it, I did the
> necessary diligence and arrived it the decision its supported.
> However, on arrival, that is no longer the case, as passing all the
> kernel parameters I could think of do not help. I am guessing they
> changed the SATA chipset.

As far as I know, Dell is perfectly willing to keep a model but change
some hardware inside.  After all dlink and linksys and such do it all
the time.  smoothwall certainly lists the vostro 200, but when did they
test it?  Which version of 200 was it?

If it doesn't detect any disks, then either you are using a much too old
version of smoothwall with an old kernel, or the chipset was changed to
a new version that needs an even newer kernel (if one exists for it yet)
or possible a bios setting has to be changed (although Dell rarely
provides those needed settings on their systems).

> Now, would anybody know of a store that carry ethernet NIC based on
> Intel based chipset? I looked around and all I could find was D-links.
> Or any card in this list?
> https://support.smoothwall.net/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=printable&kbarticleid=277

I believe that the Dlink gigabit cards are sysconnect gigabit based,
although there are even multiple versions of that chip too (which I
believe all work with current linux kernels).  Of course you never know
when they change chips in their cards either.

After looking over the smoothwall website, I think I very much dislike
them.  I don't like artificial limits added to existing linux code just
so someone can charge more money to remove those limits.  Besides
couldn't you change the code and recompile to elliminate a lot of those
limits?  It doesn't make sense to me.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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