topic Re: Boot a 6400 appliance from USB in Firewall and Security Management

Boot a 6400 appliance from USB

Mike_Jensen — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 20:08:54 GMT

I have several 6400 appliances that I need to install Gaia on using a USB flash drive. I have imaged older appliances in the past via USB without any issue.

I first tried a USB 3.0 drive and that didn't work at all. Per the Check Point documentation I needed USB 2.0 so I ordered a couple cheap USB 2.0 drives. The appliances will start to boot from the flash drive however once it starts to try installing Gaia I am prompted to select a driver, there are no USB devices in the list to chose from, and there is a option for "Have disk" where I can load a driver.

I am assuming the appliance wants a driver for the USB drive but am I wrong because the appliance did already technically boot from the USB drive?

I am using the latest version of ISOMorphic, the latest R80.30 ISO, I have tried with and without the latest CPUSE and GA Jumbo Hotfix included.

If it is my USB drive I can't find a list of compatible types from Check Point. Can anyone make a recomendation on one they know will work on a 6400?

Thank you.

Re: Boot a 6400 appliance from USB

genisis__ — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 20:24:42 GMT

I've not had this issue. I've built a 6400 using a Kingston DataTraveler G3 8GB USB stick without any issues, using R80.40 ISO. The USB was created via the ISOmorphic tool with no Jumbos etc.

Re: Boot a 6400 appliance from USB

Bob_Zimmerman — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 21:06:24 GMT

Bootstraping an x86 server is fairly complicated. You're seeing one of the side-effects of that complication.

The short explanation is the server's firmware knows how to talk to the USB drive, but the Linux kernel it has loaded does not.

R80.30 for firewalls boots the 2.6.18 kernel by default. The 6400 was introduced in 2020, so kernel 2.6.18 probably doesn't have a driver for its USB controller. Try the R80.30 ISO from sk139932. That will probably either have the driver included for 2.6.18 or will boot 3.10.

As an aside, why are you deploying a new box at R80.30 instead of R80.40? Any management version which can manage R80.30 firewalls can also manage R80.40 firewalls (R80.30 management needs jumbo 166 or later to manage forward to R80.40).

Re: Boot a 6400 appliance from USB

PhoneBoy — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 05:16:48 GMT

Pretty sure the minimum supported version for the 6400 is R80.40.
Which means you cannot boot an R80.30 (or earlier) ISO.

Re: Boot a 6400 appliance from USB

Bob_Zimmerman — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 13:39:24 GMT

sk139932 has an R80.30 ISO for the 6400. It also appears to require a special build of R80.40, which is available in the same article.

Re: Boot a 6400 appliance from USB

Erwin — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 19:27:25 GMT

I had the same issue you described. I had two identical USB drives and only one had the issue. I followed these steps to solve the issue:
- delete partition with diskpart
- format the usb disk
- write the image with isomorphic

maybe this will solve your issue too?