firewalla-serial-console

What is this project?

This project is intended to provide a simple script that can be used as a one-step connection script so you don't need to remember the ls -ltr ... command and the screen command in order to pull up a serial console on your Firewalla Gold.

Note that this project is not officially supported by either Firewalla and is provided free of charge as open source software. Firewalla and the contributors of this package provide no guarantees of compatibility or any other warranty if you choose to use this software on your machine or Firewalla Gold unit.

Usage

# Clone the repository on your Firewalla Gold
git clone https://github.com/mrodrig/firewalla-serial-console.git

# Navigate into the cloned directory and ensure the scripts are executable
cd firewalla-serial-console
chmod +x connect.sh

# Connect to the serial console using your USB to RJ45 serial cable
./connect.sh

# Hit Enter a couple of times to get the login prompt.
# When you're ready to disconnect, hit Ctrl + A + K or Ctrl + A + \ to exit

How does this work?

This script simply automates the Firewalla Gold Console connection commands from the Mac and Linux sections of the official documentation.

This will use a terminal instance on your machine to provide a console to your Firewalla Gold so that you can login as though you were physically using a keyboard and monitor directly on the box.

Once connected, you may need to hit Enter a couple of times to see the login prompt. You'll then be able to login as the pi user and can provide the password from your Firewalla App (Settings icon --> Advanced --> Configurations --> Serial Debug Console). You should then be presented with a shell prompt. After you're done, you can close the screen session by hitting either Ctrl + A + K to kill this session, or Ctrl + A + \ to kill all sessions.

Contributing

I'm open to pull requests that improve the script logic, performance, and reliability.

FAQ

Q: What cable are you using with your Firewalla Gold?

A: I wrote and verified this script using a Cable Matters USB to RJ45 Console Cable with FTDI 6 Feet. While this cable is rated for up to 250Kbps, I was only able to get it to work reliably with my Firewalla Gold on a Mac at 151200bps once I passed -ixoff to disable flow control. Firewalla doesn't mention having to pass that flag in their documentation, but it's what I found first-hand and was the only way I could reliably connect at a rate higher than 9600bps.