SOLVED How to reconnect to a box with unknown Ethernet config?

[sretalla]

It's one of those Proliant gen8 microservers.
I don't have more details readily available, but the hardward is bog-standard, the only thing I did with it was adding two HDDs and an USB stick for booting.

Oh. Right. I could pull out the stick, plug it into Linux, and check the configuration.
I should have thought about that that option earlier.

Or just pass the stick through to a vm and boot up with a screen.

 

[kdragon75]

Or just be like any other tech junky and snort all the packets you can. :D

 

[pro lamer]

the only video output is VGA

Or try finding and buying some cheap VGA -> HDMI-or-whatever-monitor-you-have adapter if cheap ones exist...

 

[toolforger]

Heh. I guess the VM option is the easiest one.

The iLO port does exist, but I never looked too deeply into it and I may even have disabled it. But it's worth a try because that's really easy to check, just plug in the cable and see what the DHCP box tells me in the web interface.

 

[toolforger]

The iLO approach came up empty. I guess I disabled it when I set the box up for a DHCP-less environment.

 

[kdragon75]

The iLO approach came up empty. I guess I disabled it when I set the box up for a DHCP-less environment.

I guess you will have to download wireshark and spend 30 seconds looking at all that traffic on that point to point link.

 

[Chris Moore]

The iLO approach came up empty. I guess I disabled it when I set the box up for a DHCP-less environment.

If you had iLO working, you wouldn't need a monitor for the unit.
If you are going to make changes that require access to the BIOS to fix, it is best to have a VGA monitor around.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

These are kind of pricey, but I have found mine to be a life saver on more than a few occasions.

https://www.startech.com/Server-Management/KVM-Switches/USB-Crash-Cart-Adapter~NOTECONS02

I keep it in my backpack, and it allows me to console into just about anything without carrying a monitor. The other big plus is I can do a screen shot of the application on my laptop to capture console messages without having to try and take picture on my phone.

 

[toolforger]

I just reinstalled to the USB stick.
If the default is to pick up the connection data via DHCP, it didn't work: The router should list it as a device but it doesn't.

Is iLO even able to do anything for me in BSD? It's a specialized port after all.

I'll investigate further tomorrow. Next thing is running the USB stick in its VM and see what the actual setup is.

Not yet willing to shell out the money for that KVM thing. It's neat but far too expensive for a one-time use case, and with my luck I fully expect that on the second time I could use it, the machine to connect to does not have a VGA output because everybody is now doing, duh, Display Port 5.x ;-)

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

Is iLO even able to do anything for me in BSD? It's a specialized port after all.

Yes. iLo, CIMC. DRAC, all though sorts of things are hardware that doesn't care about the OS. If your DHCP server is jacked, you will have to statically assign an IP. Also, you need an iLo advanced license to full KVM functions once it gets to the OS. It might work if the console is still just doing character output, but I am not sure. I haven't had to deal with a non-advanced iLo system in quite some time.

 

[Chris Moore]

Not yet willing to shell out the money for that KVM thing.

It is a little less at NewEgg:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817707357
I wan't one, but I have trouble shelling out for it, even though I know I will be able to use it many times. Maybe I can get my boss to buy one for me.

 

[Stux]

I have an ancient 17” lcd monitor. Has dvi and vga.

I use it and an old mini usb keyboard as my ‘crash cart’

I figure an old smal lcd monitor with vga in would be cheaper than the mentioned adapter.

Also, check your monitors and TVs for a vga port.

 

[Chris Moore]

I have an ancient 17” lcd monitor. Has dvi and vga.

I have 3 or 4 monitors that still have VGA connections at home and dozens of them at work. In fact we just got 82 brand new HP monitors in my department at work that all have DVI and VGA cables included. The pain of it is, the computers have Display Port out, so we have to use an adapter for every monitor and the computer only came with one adapter.

 

[toolforger]

I found the docs telling me that any live network interface should be fine, so I conclude that either the network isn't properly starting, or the box isn't booting as it should, for whatever reason.
The network light is flashing so it does at least receive packets, not that this is telling much.
I'll probably grab a VGA monitor at work. The hardware guys over here are friendly and helpful

 

[kdragon75]

Perhaps I'm missing something but I don't understand the aversion to sniffing a few packets.

 

[toolforger]

Aversion to packet sniffing? (1) I'd have to rewire things every time I switch from direct connection to router and back. (2) Normal configuration is going to be via router, so any results are going to be preliminary anyway. (3) I already tried booting with a vanilla Freenas and it wouldn't respond to DHCP, so something inside the box is broken and packet sniffing isn't going to give enough information to fix it anyway.
Taking home a monitor from work sounded like the better option, and indeed it turned out that the network interface isn't coming up at all. I don't know yet why, I suspect that the interface name varies between VM and real hardware and all attempts at configuring it inside the VM were in vain. (Why can't it just be eth0... even if that's installed just as an alias to the real network interface... but ah well, I don't know the design space that FreeBSD lives in so I'm not going to judge.)

 

[kdragon75]

(1) I'd have to rewire things every time I switch from direct connection to router and back.

Every time you forget the IP?

(2) Normal configuration is going to be via router, so any results are going to be preliminary anyway.

Right until you could log in and correct it.

(3) I already tried booting with a vanilla Freenas and it wouldn't respond to DHCP, so something inside the box is broken and packet sniffing isn't going to give enough information to fix it anyway.

I'll be honest, I missed this part.

I suspect that the interface name varies between VM and real hardware and all attempts at configuring it inside the VM were in vain.

Correct. The interfaces are named by the driver. em0, ixgbe, vmx, etc.

Why can't it just be eth0...

It's not Linux, even then most distros are changing that.

 

[toolforger]

I don't really buy that eth0 is going away; I'd rather expect new aliases and new ways to identify devices come up. (Linus gets really angry if people break backwards compatibility. Not that Linus has much say in distro policy, but people tend to listen to him when he's talking about kernel-related stuff.)

Anyway. Hooking up a VGA monitor and reconfiguring Network Interfaces did the trick.

---

I think Freenas should be somewhat smarter to cover the "started in a VM and was transplanted to real hardware" case.
Maybe a new Console Setup action "Prepare for new hardware", setting up things so that it will aggressively connect to whatever network driver reports a DHCP response. And possibly reset any other persistent driver stuff back to "autodetect" instead of assuming the previous hardware is still there but inactive.

What do people think?

If some kind of consensus emerges, I'll set up a bug tracker entry.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

I think Freenas should be somewhat smarter to cover the "started in a VM and was transplanted to real hardware" case.

I can't think of a single compelling reason to spend a bunch of development time for a corner case. I am sorry if this comes across as grouchy, but I think it was wildly unrealistic of you to think it would somehow magically know and sort things out. I would say FreeNAS/FreeBSD did a pretty good job of sorting things out. I would always expect to have to go to the console to redo the networking configuration if a bunch of changes were made to networking hardware.

 

[toolforger]

Obviously I'm pretty biased about whether my experience was a corner case. Headless installation isn't an outlandish concept anyway, "headless" is even common technical terminology.
But that may be as it be: lowering the entry barrier is also widely recognized as Good to Have.

I don't think it would require a lot of coding. The code for NIC autodetection is already in place if I read the manual right ("uses any live network connection" or something like that); it just didn't work, presumably because a NIC was actually configured during the VM setup.

Plus I see a lot of things have been added recently that seem much more like corner cases to me.
Proving that "corner case" is in the eye of the beholder

Anyway. I'm not going to argue the development team's priorities, there may be a ton of things that have a better effort-to-effect ratio.
You might be falling prey to the NIH syndrome. Let the idea sink in for a while, let's see what users say.