ET/DemoCD FreeBSD Setup Manual

The ET/DemoCD is a CD-ROM that demonstrates the function and user interface of the ET Bandwidth Manager Appliances on your hardware.

ET/DemoCD Requirements:

General Requirements:

• i386 Celeron or higher class CPU
• 2 Compatible Ethernet interfaces (Intel Pro/100 [fxp], Intel Pro/1000 825XXX Gigabit [em], Intel Pro/1000 82575 Gigabit [igb] are recommended.)
• Fully ATAPI compliant CD-ROM drive.
• IDE, SCSI, or SATA hard drive. (1GB for storing stats information, 10GB+ for CD Appliance installation.)*
• Floppy Drive (optional, for storing configuration if not using hard drive)
• 1GB RAM
• Direct Internet Access (to run the full demo, otherwise a limited demo will run)

*Using a hard drive for stats storage involves an automated repartitioning and reformatting of the disk prior to the first use. In order to prevent accidental erasure of data, the hard drive will not be used by default. You must answer "y" to a prompt at boot time to enable use of the hard drive. For extended testing, we recommend using a hard drive. The GUI will respond much faster, and your configuration will be automatically restored at boot. SATA support in 4.9 is limited mostly to controllers that emulate an IDE mode.

Motherboard Requirements:

• At least 1 IDE Controller
• BIOS that supports booting from CD-ROM drive.
• Serial Port.
• SCSI support is includes Adaptec 39320/29320 AIC79-series controllers

Setup Notes

• Make sure the first serial port (COM1) is enabled with the default values (3F8, IRQ4). If this is not done, the machine will lock up during the first boot stage, as the kernel on the CD requires it to be there.
• Enter the BIOS configuration, and select the CDROM as the first boot device.

After installing the ethernet cards and configuring the BIOS, insert the ET/DemoCD into the CD-ROM drive and boot the machine.

Before You Begin

Before booting the CD for the first time, connect one of your ethernet devices to a hub or switch.
Once the boot has completed, log on to the console. The network configuration will be automatically started. You will see a list of all detected ethernet devices and their link status. If the utility finds your ethernet device(s), you can proceed with the IP configuration and make sure that you can start the full demo, and then make note of which physical ethernet ports correspond to the detected ports.

Ethernet devices will be shown with names that are dependent on what type of card is found. If you have Intel 10/100 based NICs they will be shown as fxpN, where N is 0, 1, etc in the order that they are detected. Gigabit Intels are emN, and 3com cards will be shown as xlN. The order in which they are detected is not easily determined in advance, as it depends on the way that the motherboard manufacturer lays out the buses. Even if you have a dual NIC motherboard there is no guarantee that the order will correspond with numbers on the physical ports.

The following ethernet devices are compiled into the kernel on the CD, and should be detected automatically:

• fxp [Intel 10/100 Ethernet]
• em [Intel 10/100/1000 Ethernet, ET/GigFailover]
• igb [Intel 10/100/1000 Ethernet, ET/GigFailover]
• bge [Broadcom 10/100/1000 Ethernet]

Other drivers are also available on the CD as kernel modules, which can be loaded by accessing the device name with the 'ifconfig' command. To see the list of available driver name and the supported devices, take a look at the FreeBSD 7.0 hardware notes page. Note that the availability of a driver does not mean that it's well-suited for bandwidth management, so if you are not using a recommended driver, make sure you test it well. As an example, if you have a RealTek card that isn't detected automatically, you would first try the 'rl' driver:

# ifconfig rl0

If the driver supports the card, you will then be able to configure your ethernet device(s).

Using the ET/DemoCD with only 1 Ethernet Interface

A typical setup for a bandwidth management appliance is with 2 ethernet interfaces set up in "bridging mode", where it acts as a transparent device through which all of your network traffic passes. For convenience, you can run the CD demo with only one interface, which allows you to view the User Interface and test limits on the IP addresses of devices accessing the Demo box itself. This might be useful if you do not have a spare computer and you do not want to reconfigure an existing workstation. You should be able to just pop the CD in any PC-compatible workstation, provided it has a supported NIC, and it should work.

Note that there are often issues running unix operating systems on laptops, so we don't recommend that you do so. You can try, but if it doesn't work please try something with a standard PC-type motherboard.

Booting the ET/DemoCD

The ET/DemoCD is designed to simulate our hard-drive based appliances as closely as possible, within the limits of a read-only media (CD-ROM). For extended testing, a hard drive is used to store statistics and configuration information.

Messages highlighted in green during the boot refer to messages detailing operations specific to the CD-ROM. You will see a line during the boot process that indicates the memory disks are being prepared. Depending on the speed of your CD-ROM drive, this may take several minutes. Once the machine finishes booting and you see the login prompt, system operation for the most part is identical to the operation of an ET/R series bandwidth manager. Hence, you should use the ET appliance manual as a reference for using the ET/DemoCD demo disk.

If a hard drive is found when the ET/DemoCD boots, you will be asked if you want to use this hard drive for storing statistics and configuration. Please note that if you choose to use the hard disk (by pressing 'y' and the 'enter' key), the disk will be erased and reformatted. Do not use a hard drive with contents that you want to keep. Once the disk is prepared and formatted, it will used automatically on subsequent boots. While the disk is being prepared, you may see a few error messages about disklabels and fdisk - you can safely ignore these. If you wish to prepare the hard drive, do not type "YES" or "yes" - only a single lowercase "y" character followed by "enter" will be accepted. Pressing any other key will result in the hard drive being disabled.

Initial Setup

Once the system boot is complete, the setup script will be run automatically. First, you will be prompted to choose the password used to access the system. This must be done before you can login to the system remotely, or use the ET/Admin GUI. Once you set a password, you then will be prompted for the rest of the setup info for the system, specifically the IP address and mask, the default gateway and your DNS server. In order to run the full demo the machine will need to contact our server, so you must enter this info correctly. You may also need to remove any firewalls you might have in between. If the system can't contact our server, you will only be able to run the "limited" demo, which runs for 1 hour, is limited to 10Mb/s and only allows 10 rules.

You will be asked which interface in your system is to be assigned the IP address. This should be the interface that has direct access to the internet. This should be the interface that you have already connected, and should show a link status of "up". As stated earlier, the system will need to contact our server before it initializes bridging, so the port with the IP address has to be on the network segment connected to your default router.

Once you have completed the installation the bandwidth manager will be started and you should be able to proceed with using the system as you would a normal appliance.

Notes on Subsequent Boots of the CD Demo

If you are using a hard disk, the CD will automatically detect this and use the information stored there, so your configuration and any rules you created will be reapplied as it would on an appliance. If you are not using a hard drive, you will either have to start from scratch at the next boot, or save your configuration manually to a floppy disk. To save your information, you will need to go to "Backup/Restore System" in the HTML interface and save your setup/configuration files to a floppy disk. You can leave the floppy disk in the system, and then when you reboot it will retrieve the setup info from the floppy disk.

Note that a floppy disk will override checking the hard drive. If there is a floppy detected, the assumption is made that you don't have a hard drive that can be used. If you are using a hard drive, make sure that there is no floppy in the drive when you reboot.

Checking Your Setup

If everything is set up correctly, the bandwidth manager should be running and the two ethernet ports should be bridged and passing traffic transparently through the system. If you can ping from a network segment connected to one interface to devices on the network segment connected to the second port, then you can be fairly sure that things are working properly. You should also be able to ping the machine on its IP address from both segments.

If something doesn't work as expected, then you should take a quick look at your setup to see if things are what you expect. You can use ifconfig -a to see that that correct interface has the address. You can also do:

# bwmgr showbridges

which should show that the bandwidth manager is running and that the two ethernet interfaces are set up from bridging, similar to the following:

ET/BWMGR: Running
em2 Group:0 Forwarding:<FFWD >
em3 Group:0 Forwarding:<FFWD >

If necessary, you can redo the setup by running "etip" from the command prompt.

# etip

This will re-run the setup script to configure the interfaces.

Accessing the System from your Browser

The HTML interface can be accessed with the address http://your_ipaddress:10000 from any browser that can ping the machine. You should get a pop-up password window for which you need to enter "admin" as the user and "saturn5" as the password.

Once you've entered the HTML interface, you can proceed as if you are using once of our appliances. The standard documentation, the ET appliance User Manual is in the Support->Manuals section of www.etinc.com. There is also a copy of the manuals in the HTML gui under Docs->System Configuration Manuals.

ET/DemoCD Limitations

While the demo is designed to work just like an appliance, there are of course limitations. The first and most notable is response time. Many of the binaries and scripts are stored on the CD-ROM, so when you run a command for the first time there may be a noticeable delay. The delays range from slightly noticeable to very slow, depending on the CD-ROM drive you have. When you first run the GUI it will take a minute to bring up the entire screen. This "slowness" does not occur on our appliances. Once the page loads completely, the GUI will function normally. Using a hard drive will help reduce these delays.

A second limitation is storage space. If you are using a hard drive, you will have at least 500MB of storage, which is more than enough to storage for a month with 300 rules with statistics enabled. If you are not using a hard drive, the stats will be stored on a memory disk, which should have enough space to store a few days of stats. Note that the statistics database is not stored when backing up to a floppy disk, so you will only see stats information from the current boot.

Getting a Longer Demo

The standard demo runs for 6 hours, and then you have to reboot to start it again. You may run the full demo for 20 days. The 6 hours is designed to allow you to set it up in the morning and take it down at the end of the day, under manned control. If you know what you're doing you could program the machine to reboot every 6 hours and you'll have a minor annoyance of downtime while its rebooting, but typically its not designed to run continuously. The 6 hours should allow you to test it throughout your entire busy period.

If you require a longer demo, you can purchase a 30 day test license from us. The test key still requires your machine to contact our server to authenticate the license, but once it is authorized it will run for 30 days from the time we send it to you without stopping. Unlike fully purchased licenses, you will have to contact our server each time you restart the system. The test licenses are $100, which is an administration fee for issuing the license and for providing limited support during the 30 day period.

Your Options, If you decide to buy

The purpose of the CD Demo is for potential customers to to provide a fast and easy way to test the ET/BWMGR with their existing network. Licenses are priced according to the required throughput and the capabilities of the hardware you are using. See the ET/BWMGR v4.0 Licensing document for details.

Building an Appliance from the CD

Building a CD appliance requires a valid license and support. Once you receive your license, you can then run the installer. Before purchasing a license, you must provide a serial number. In the following example, the serial number will be generated using the "em0" interface.

# bwmgr em0 serialize

You can use any ethernet interface, but note that the serial will be different for each one. Make sure you use a device that will always be present in the machine, because it will be required to start your system once you get your license. We HIGHLY RECOMMEND using Intel controllers, mainly because we have the most experience with them. Also make sure that you have tested the hardware thoroughly, as licenses cannot be returned.

To begin the installation, run one of the following two commands from the console, logged in as the "root" user.

To perform a standalone installation from CD:
# cdinstall [erase]

To perform a full installation (including the latest software updates since your CD was issued):

# etinstall [erase]
Adding the option "erase" option will erase and re-partition the disk prior to installation.

Download the current production demo CD

*NOTE: To avoid excessive downloads by curiousity-seekers we're requiring that you contact us before you can download the CD. Please open a sales ticket and let us know your IP Address so we can add you to the access list, and provide a link to the CD image.