BlinkLED

[gderf]

BlinkLED is a pfsense feature that allows LEDs available on ALIX boards to be assigned to network interfaces and indicate the presence of traffic on them. Would be useful for installations where the rear panel is not visible, but the front panel is. See:


https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/BlinkLED_Package

[andywhite]

I'll have a look.  What status do you want the Leds to represent? 

[gderf]

Currently, LED 1 (the far left) indicates power on.


I would like to have the three LEDs indicate network traffic on the three available interfaces as I don't see having a power on indicator (the current LED 1 behavior) necessary because any network traffic on any interface would indicate that the unit is switched on.


A compromise would be to have LED 1 indicate power on, and the other two LEDs could be user assigned to any two of the three available interfaces.


Thanks.

[rpsmith]

Looks like that package only supports ALIX and WRAP.  Not Soekris and most likely not any newer embedded hardware.  If it was somehow supported as a package, that would be one thing but I would not be in favor of rolling it into the standard images.

Just my take on it.

Roy...

[andywhite]

The package simply uses /dev/led to set lights on/off , if other systems have led support in freebsd then in theory they should work too ...

APU boards aren't supported in freebsd 8.4 for LED, but are in 10.x , so it should be possible to support them also.

There is some code specific to alix and to wrap already for using the reset button (this needs to include APU boards now also), and showing systems temperature and fan speed only works on some system boards too, so I don't have an objection to adding something like this.  Incidentally , using the reset button on wrap/alix causes the leds to flash 5 times to indicate it is resetting.

However i'm not sure if using it as an alternative to NIC activity lights is the right thing to do , it might be more useful to indicate forwarded packets on one LED, and CPU utilisation on another etc

[gderf]

Well, I'm flexible - anything other than 'always off' would make sense to me.

[rpsmith]

Looks like I was wrong about not supporting Soekris.

Found this on the pfsense website:

blinkled - Allows system LEDs to be used for network activity on supported platforms (ALIX, WRAP, Soekris, etc)


Roy...

[andywhite]

This is completed and apu is supported on 1.10.X builds

[Ben Garrison]

I'll have a look.  What status do you want the Leds to represent?

I have a suggestion: could we have the three leds showing firewall load or cpu use?

i.e. no leds <33%
1 led 33%
2 leds 66%
3 leds, firewall getting hammered

Can do the same for bandwidth, with configurable limits.

Thoughts?

[andywhite]

I think it's personal taste.  The existing method gives the same information by flashing the LEDs at different speeds.

If enough people thought it useful I'd consider it.   Also you could consider graphing it with snmp and setting up alerts with external tools.