OpenBSD on the Whistle Interjet

The Whistle Interjet was an early "Internet Appliance", sold as a simple to manage firewall, web server, mail server and file server. There were at least two major revisions of the InterJet -- a 486 based system, typically owned outright by the customer and a Pentium class system, which was leased from IBM, after IBM purchased Whistle. As I have never seen one of the Pentium-class InterJet, this article will be about the older 486-class machine.

Specs:

Processor: some speed 80486 compatible. To be honest, I never figured out what speed the thing runs at for sure. I *believe* it was a 25MHz bus, I assumed it was a 25MHz processor, but I saw something recently that indicated that it could be a DX2 class or maybe even faster. Mine was a non-Intel chip. I've replaced it with a DX4/100 Because I Could. A Kingston accelerator works fine, too, though since the machine is otherwise fanless, I went with the passively cooled DX4.
Network adapter: I have seen two different NICs in these systems, one, a four-port "Hub-NIC", which has a low-quality NE2000 compatible chip, along with a five-port hub (four ports externally accessible, the fifth being the NIC, of course). The chip is at 300/10, which is nicely supported by OpenBSD's ne(4) driver as "ne1". The other NIC I have seen is a dual-AT/LANTIC based adapter. The AT/LANTIC is typically one of the best NE2000 compatible cards I have seen, however this one is in a "Western Digital" mode -- using shared RAM. I suspect the card could be set to NE2000 compatible mode, but there is no real reason to do so, and I don't trust most of the utilities I have to be able to recover from a screwup, so I did not touch the settings of this card, and instead, adapted OpenBSD to it. Note that this is a dual ISA NIC card, not a common beast at all. However, as far as the OS is concerned, it is just two NICs on the bus. The ISA bus has no concept of "bridges" like the PCI bus does. The settings my dual card was set to:
```
we0 at isa0 port 0x340/32 iomem 0xd0000/16384 irq 11: WD8013EBT (16-bit)
we0: address 00:60:61:03:08:0d
we1 at isa0 port 0x300/32 iomem 0xcc000/16384 irq 10: WD8013EBT (16-bit)
we1: address 00:60:61:02:07:99
```
You will note the MAC addresses are not consecutive -- this is really just two ISA NICs on one card.
The serial port on the back of the machine is com0, can be used for serial console, though the ROM does no "serial redirection".
The LCD pannel and keypad on the front of the machine are a serial terminal, attached to com1 (second serial port) running at 57600bps. The information here, is accurate, including the perl script, which works unmodified on OpenBSD.
The machine has NO provisions for install media on the box. You will basically have to mount the HD in another machine to install any OS on this system. I pulled the NIC out of the Interjet and used it on the install box, then moved it and the HD over to the Interjet, worked great. After initial install, in theory, you can live off the serial console, and do bsd.rd installs. Don't forget, at least the dual NIC is not at "OpenBSD Standard" locations, you will have to do a bit of work with ukc>.
Installing an ISA VGA card in the machine will give you a better idea what is going wrong if it doesn't boot on first try. On the other hand, serial console in theory does the same.
When I first started working with this box, it refused to boot with an unmodified boot(8) file, as it hung probing for the floppy. This has been fixed since OpenBSD 3.4 and later.
There is a battery in the box that acts as a UPS. However, OpenBSD does not know how to power down this box, so it is of highly questionable use. In fact, I had repeatedly had to open my InterJets to unplug the battery to reset them, so I finally just leave the battery disconnected now. The power button on the back was intended to be used to remove AC power from the box, that would put the machine on battery, and trigger the shutdown process, which would end by removing power from the machine (equiv. to a halt -p). Without the power-down support, however, the power switch just pushes the machine over to battery power...and as the battery dies, the machine locks...and stays locked if you reapply power before it has gone COMPLETELY dead.
The machine has a few ISA slots -- I've plugged 3c515 and 3c509B cards in it, no problems found.
There is a sb(4) chip in the thing! The original Whistle software would ... you guessed it, make a whistling noise on boot. I have not used this, and don't know what I'd do with it. I think I tried something once, and got nothing -- probably wrong IRQ.
I've put up to 32M of RAM in the machines, I suspect 64M would be no problem. There are two 72 pin SIMM slots.
Supposedly, there is a set of pins a keyboard can be attached to. Never tried it.
There is a potentiometer which can be used to adjust LCD contrast on the processor board.
I have seen both an ISDN modem and a dialup modem in the InterJets -- I have attempted to use neither. They were pulled before I even tried to get a dmesg out of 'em. Maybe they work, maybe not.

I've used one of these machines as a 1:1 NAT box so I can keep a constant MAC address to my ISP (and thus, a stable IP, and don't have to reboot the cable modem when I change computers) for over a year, no problem. I had been using one as a DNS resolver for a while, plan was to actually display most recent queries on the LCD display, but I wanted to do some fancier stuff, and ended up wanting a faster processor, at least until I am done playing. For the right applications, these boxes make decent fanless systems, almost begging to have a flash device installed for completely silent operation.

dmesg:

OpenBSD 3.6-current (GENERIC) #129: Sat Nov 20 23:14:27 MST 2004
    deraadt@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
cpu0: Intel 486DX4 ("GenuineIntel" 486-class)
cpu0: FPU,V86
real mem  = 33136640 (32360K)
avail mem = 22102016 (21584K)
using 430 buffers containing 1761280 bytes (1720K) of memory
mainbus0 (root)
bios0 at mainbus0: AT/286+(00) BIOS, date 04/27/96
pcibios at bios0 function 0x1a not configured
bios0: ROM list: 0xe0000/0x200 0xec000/0x4000
cpu0 at mainbus0
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 2 (no bios)
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0 "Acer Labs M1489 PCI" rev 0x00
isa0 at mainbus0
isadma0 at isa0
pckbc0 at isa0 port 0x60/5
pckbd0 at pckbc0 (kbd slot)
pckbc0: using irq 1 for kbd slot
wskbd0 at pckbd0: console keyboard
wdc0 at isa0 port 0x1f0/8 irq 14
wd0 at wdc0 channel 0 drive 0: 
wd0: 16-sector PIO, LBA, 2014MB, 4124736 sectors
wd0(wdc0:0:0): using BIOS timings
we0 at isa0 port 0x340/32 iomem 0xd0000/16384 irq 11: WD8013EBT (16-bit)
we0: address 00:60:61:03:08:0d
we1 at isa0 port 0x300/32 iomem 0xcc000/16384 irq 10: WD8013EBT (16-bit)
we1: address 00:60:61:02:07:99
ep0 at isa0 port 0x210/16 irq 9: address 00:20:af:cd:87:af, utp (default utp)
sb0 at isa0 port 0x220/16 irq 5 drq 1: dsp v2.01
midi0 at sb0: 
audio0 at sb0
opl at sb0 not configured
pcppi0 at isa0 port 0x61
midi1 at pcppi0: 
sysbeep0 at pcppi0
npx0 at isa0 port 0xf0/16: using exception 16
pccom0 at isa0 port 0x3f8/8 irq 4: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
pccom0: console
pccom1 at isa0 port 0x2f8/8 irq 3: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
biomask f1c5 netmask ffc5 ttymask ffc7
pctr: no performance counters in CPU
dkcsum: wd0 matched BIOS disk 80
root on wd0a
rootdev=0x0 rrootdev=0x300 rawdev=0x302
WARNING: NVRAM century is 165 but RTC year is 2004

Best info I've found on InterJets

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since Aug. 24, 2004

OpenBSD on the Whistle Interjet

$Id: interjet.html,v 1.6 2004/11/23 01:57:39 nick Exp $