I was given an old vpn firewall and have tried numerous times to hard reset the device, with no luck, I did pull the hard drive from the unit and can access the info via a Slax cd. I am wondering is there a way to obtaint he default ip address and password from the hard disk or am i just SOL on this, and scrap the thing? When I plug the drive and try to boot it gives me ( Kernal Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 16:01) does anyone know what that means? Any help would be great!

Thanks for your response guys
It is a Barbedwire Technologies DPI-50w There is a serial port, three rj45, and two usb ports on the back of the appliance. That is it. I removed the hard drive from inside in order to see if the data was still in the drive and that ther drive was reading. I have also tried holding in thr reset button, but to no avail. I even tried the hold in then unplug the power then turn it back on and it still does not go back to default. It would be a shame to let this unit go to waste it would suit my needs perfect if I could ever get back into it. Does this provide you with a little more info?

Hello and Welcome to LinuxQuestions,

Normally there is always a way to reset equipment to its factory defaults. Most of the firewalls and routers allow this procedure from a console connection, meaning you have to physically connect your computers RS232 port to the console connection on the firewall and open a terminal connection. Post the complete name and model of your firewall in order to get correct information from users here.

Kind regards,

Eric

Hi,
If you can use 'slax' to boot then create a mount point and mount the device with the system to that point. You can then chroot to perform whatever is necessary to get the unit working again. It does look like the filesystem for the kernel is not compiled in. You could create a initrd or find out why the kernel is faulting. I like to keep a kernel image for safe/single mode boots for just this reason.

Thanks for your response guys
It is a Barbedwire Technologies DPI-50w There is a serial port, three rj45, and two usb ports on the back of the appliance. That is it. I removed the hard drive from inside in order to see if the data was still in the drive and that ther drive was reading. I have also tried holding in thr reset button, but to no avail. I even tried the hold in then unplug the power then turn it back on and it still does not go back to default. It would be a shame to let this unit go to waste it would suit my needs perfect if I could ever get back into it. Does this provide you with a little more info?

Hello,

I'm not familiar with that brand but I imagine that you could connect a console cable to the serial port, connect with terminal and see what gets listed during boot sequence. Hopefully there's an interrupt key when booting so you can get into the heart of the thing. I checked for the website of the manufacturer but seems to be unavailable.

Best of luck.

Kind regards,

Eric

Hey thanks for the help, On a another note do have a reco for a linux version totally dedicated to being a media server?