Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Fedora 23 Broken Grub - Boot to Grub Prompt

So today I swapped laptops from a Lenovo W510 with an HP Elitebook 8570p as a test with a Fedora  23 install.

Now for safeties sake I did image the drive with Clonezilla first to a local USB drive for safe keeping.  Then I swapped the drives and booted up.  Boot came directly to the grub prompt.

After multiple Googling's I decided to try the SuperGrubDisk2 iso..  So I booted it up and it found all the entries in my grub.cfg file.  Being relatively new to this level of troubleshooting Linux I decided to have it boot me into my correct kernel.  Once logged in I verified it was indeed the correct kernel (which it was) so then from a terminal I ran the following:


sudo grub2-install /dev/sda

Which completed without error.  Then,

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Then rebooted.  VIOLA! It works correctly now. And I must say a helluva lot easier and less painful than switching boot drives in Windows.

Monday, April 4, 2016

Virtualizing Multi-WAN pFSense on ESXi 5.5

So in an effort to both over-complicate my hose network setup and introduce a platform to test alternative Firewall distros over this past week end I stood up an ESXi 5.5. box.  It's running on a Dell Optiplex 790:

Core I5-2400 3.1ghz - 8gb ram - 128gb generic SSD - 3 x Intel nics, 1 x Broadcom nic.


I have 3 x 3mb ATT 'Uverse' circuits, I had to opt for ATT Business in order to get those.  Which is not a bad thing.  I signed no contract so I can leave whenever I want.  And I pay no more than a residential customer.

Anyway  here's a cool diagram of my new found setup.






















The nics I wound up using were all pcie.. the single Broadcom, a single Intel then a dual headed Intel.

I gave the pF vm 2gb of ram, and a 9gb virtual hard disk.. it's load is light and even those resources are at least twice what any pF appliance will have.  Now the ESXi install is actually running of a 4gb class 10 micro SD card in a micro SD to USB adapter.  The generic 128gb SSD is only used for the Datastore.