Hello! I’m new here and only found the forums from this post, which seemed to be the only post anywhere with someone having the same problem as me.
@Bahamut_X
I found myself in the exact same position as you, with installing pfsense on the exact same machine. It wouldn’t surprise me if we got our machines from the same place. After several nights of googling things, I finally just started poking around and believe I found a way to make this work.
First, this may not matter, but I installed pfsense using the UEFI option and not ZFS, thinking maybe the machine just hates ZFS. I was able to install pfsense on the bluecoat doing this. Note I had an old graphics card plugged in and was not using the serial connection.
My machine came with some kind of proprietary software that wouldn’t boot, however I could get into diagnostics. From there I was able to disable the bypass between 2:0 and 2:1. It was temporary, of course, as it reset on a reboot as the machine is designed to fail into bypass mode. There are a bank of relays in the machine that physically connect ports 2:0 and 2:1 for the proxy bypass. The key seems to be to get the relays to stay locked in the disconnected position. This may be possible through pfsense or elsewhere in FreeBSD… but I could not find it. So I went the hardware route. However if there’s a software solution I would love to know what it is.
Inside the machine you can see the 4 relays between the NIC ports, under the PCIe expansion bay. Next to those are two small blue jumpers. One of these jumpers actually connects the relay control negative terminal to ground. Removing this jumper should disconnect the relay coil from ground, making it impossible for the board to actuate the relays.
If you go into the diagnostics that came on the machine (assuming you still can - I created a disk image from the SSD before installing pfsense on it since the thing seems to be locked in on booting from that SSD and only from the port on the board… so I was able to switch back and forth during testing by just reimaging the drive), do the command:
config bypass 2:0 off
to disable the bypass, then pull those two jumpers. Reboot the machine in pfsense, and you should be able to use the ports now.
A bit of an asterisk, however. Before figuring out the ports were actually enable, I did a lot of poking around on the board and actually managed to damage the relay controller. I had to flip my relays by applying 3.3v across the coils with the machine off. I can’t deny the possibility that I actually damaged something else that allows my machine to work the way I want it now… but at this point my best guess is just getting those relays stuck in the right spot.
I will note, though, that for some reason any change I make to the interface settings requires a reboot to take effect. I thought that odd but it seems to be working now.
Huge YMMV note on this, and I can’t guarantee any of this will work. I was in a position that if I fried the machine I wouldn’t really care. If that’s not the case for you, then you should not attempt this.
I have no idea how IPMI works so I have no thoughts on that.