katmook
join:2009-06-09
Salt Lake City, UT
|  [Other] Can anyone help me with a Nomadix USG II?
I recently picked up a Nomadix USG II and was looking to get it running. I used to work with these a lot a few years back in a previous job and had always wanted to play around with one and maybe set one up for a hotspot. Yes I realize there are easier and quicker ways today but this is fun for me!
So I have the box and picked up a serial cable for it. I wasn't seeing anything and I'm pretty sure I'm using the correct settings (8,n,1 9600) but still I get nothing. I've tried a few different serial cables and unless the previous owner set the serial port settings to something different, something is wrong here.
I don't think there's an easy way to reset these. I even tried resetting the bios on the small motherboard inside. Hope I didn't mess anything up there.
There's really no easy way to even see if it's booting correctly without getting the needed adapters for the motherboard but I can't even find where they would sell those online. There's a PCI slot, so I wonder if I could plug a regular PCI video card in there just to see if it boots up. Or would it recognize that there's hardware there that shouldn't be and just not load?
Since the computer is just an old x86 based system, I tried putting the 16MB disk on flash chip into another computer and tried to boot from there. It just froze up completely which may be normal. However I recall doing the same thing to a different model's disk on flash chip (the older model that was based on some 486) and it would simply reboot over and over. So I have to wonder if maybe something's wrong with the disk itself...
I tried contacting Nomadix to see if they could offer any help which they're not willing to do. I even asked them if they could reference me to someone but they sent the same canned response that said they no longer support the product.
So here I am with this old USG II that I would like to get running but I honestly have no idea what could be wrong with it. It could be the disk on chip, maybe it could be the ram, I don't know. I should try replacing the ram next I guess. But does anyone have any idea what else I could try?
It's not a total loss. If I can't get the Nomadix OS to work on this thing I guess I could turn it into a small router or something.
I know this is a lot of work to get this going but I don't mind.  |
katmook
join:2009-06-09
Salt Lake City, UT
| update: Looks like it was the ram. I threw a stick of 256MB PC133 into there and ran the old 128MB stick through memtest86 on an old computer and just got problems all over the place. Going to turn it into a bracelet or something.
I think that the serial port is shot though because I still can't get that working. BUT, I took out the disk on chip device, put that into a linux box and then mounted it. I could read the current config and was able to get into it just fine after setting the IP's accordingly. |
