The Land of Fire, Ice and Very Expensive Soup

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We’re just back from 4 nights in Reykjavik, which was an absolute blast. We did the usual suspects with trips to the Golden Circle and the Blue Lagoon. We weren’t so lucky with the Northern Lights, although we did get to see a murmuring on our second last night. The long exposure below [15 seconds, F4, ISO 800] picks out a lot more detail than was visible with the naked eye:

Northern Lights

Northern Lights

We knew from the weather forecast that there wasn’t really much point in booking an organised tour [and we really only had two nights to play with]. This was actually on a night when the tours had been cancelled. The composition is dire, but it was the darkest spot that we could find around the Old Harbour, and it was blowing a gale.

A few other obligatory waterfall / geyser type shots included below. Oh, and just to explain the title: on the Golden Circle, we called in for lunch at the facilities by Geysir, where you suffer the consequences of being a captive audience. The fish soup we had for lunch was delicious, but £28 for two bowls was almost as memorable as the scenery!

Gullfoss

Gullfoss

A Geyser; not the Geysir

A Geyser; not the Geysir

Where gloves go to die

Where gloves go to die

pfSense: Adding a Second LAN

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While this is undoubtedly a beginner’s question, it’s one that I spent most of yesterday wrestling with. I also really struggled to find information on it: how to add a second LAN.

There are plenty of ways of achieving what I want on my network – to subdivide it between devices I trust, and ones I don’t [or at least trust less, such as my IP camera]. The new machine I got to run pfSense on has 4 network interfaces, so I decided to run two LANs straight off the adaptors [leaving one spare for a possible future experiment with IoT nonsense].

Adding the interface is well documented, as is the ‘default allow’ you’ll need to set in the firewall rules. What you also need to do is to configure a DHCP server, which is under the Services menu in the WebGUI. You’ll see there is an entry already configured for the first LAN, which you can use to figure out the settings. Obviously, this assumes that you configured the LAN for DHCP during the setup, which almost everyone is going to want to do.

I set an address range of .2 – .254, and then configured both the DNS server and the Gateway on .1. You’ll also have to set the ‘enable DHCP’ checkbox at the top, which is disabled by default.

While it’s obvious in retrospect, I went in completely the wrong direction, thinking it was something to do with routing rules. Routing is all well and good, but I was never going to get very far without an IP address :).

pfSense on a Celeron J1900

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I spent the weekend setting up pfSense on a new piece of kit that I got last week. A reseller on Amazon is selling a bare bones box with 4 ethernet ports, a Celeron J1900 processor, 2Gb of RAM and a 64Gb SSD for £170, which I thought would be perfect for the task. It’s probably a little over-spec’ed if anything, but it’s a really lovely piece of kit.

I spent the entirety of the install process navigating various options in the Aptio BIOS interface. I had two issues. The first was pretty trivial, which was setting the boot order via ‘HD BBS Priorities’. The option above, ‘Boot Option’ seemed like the more likely but didn’t have any effect.

The second took me hours to figure out. I could see lots of Google hits for BSD installs and runtime issues, but nothing that fit the problem that I was having. During the install a command called bsdlabel hung, and then returned an error, ‘WRITE_EPDMA_QUEUED’, followed by ‘CAM status: command timeout’.

To cut a [very] long story short, I fixed it by setting SATA CONFIG -> SATA Mode -> IDE Mode.

It took me so long to get the install working I’ve not had a chance to play with pfSense itself yet, other than to prove it’s working. One immediate challenge I’ve yet to figure out is how to access the web interface if it’s ‘north’ of a wireless access point….