[SOLVED] Another untangle issue

[occsean]

Got my nexgen appliance in the mail today. Upon boot went into GUI and locked. Tried a few more times and got same response. In the meantime I noticed that the date and time were wrong so went into bios and updated that to correct time and date.

Now system boots to a console login with a Plymouth error Did a little reading and apparently that can happen when changing date and time. Who knew? So now it will boot to 30 seconds of GUI when using the kern grub selection and then goes black. Other options just dump to console login with Plymouth error.

I have a ticket in with nexgen as we speak but I was really hoping I could get to work on this tonight.

Can I just reload untangle using USB? Or is it using a special load of untangle from nexgen? What happens if I hit the hard reset on the front? I'm scared to find out.

I've tried hooking up eth0 up my LAN and my MacBook Pro onto eth1 but there is no address handed out. Maybe hard code address? Again, not sure.

In any event I'm hoping someone has been down this road before and can share a solution.


I don't have a signature

 

[CLC]

You should be able to reload a regular distro of untangle, but I would suggest in the future that you buy differently. From the specs I see on their website you can be better hardware at a better cost and use a regular distro. is there a reason you went with this company?

 

[tek9]

I had a Nexgen Untangle unit that wouldn't fully boot to the GUI the first time as well. Just reloaded Untangle from USB and continued.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I'm sure you'll get a response soon, they're (Rob and Jim from Nexgen) out in the mid south west somewhere..time zone wise. During the kern selection pick Safe Mode.

We've been buying from NexGen for many..many years. Good industrial grade products, good support.

 

[occsean]

I ended up spending some time on the phone with Rob today. I just did a simple blow disk away and reinstall and everything is happy happy. Well, except I can't figure out for the life of me why eth1 will not work. I banged my head against a wall for a short time before I moved on and just moved to the internal LAN over to port eth2. I'll probably reach out to NexGen and see what it is I am missing.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Does the status light in the Network section even light up when you plug a cable in?

 

[occsean]

Does the status light in the Network section even light up when you plug a cable in?

Nope...I have an email into Rob. Tried addressed, bridged to internal, and bridged to WAN...not a link light to be seen

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Got zapped by a POE uplink, 48 volts.
Note...good practice on POE switches to....wait for a period of time after unplugging POE clients from a port, and then uplinking that port.
And continuing good practice, disable POE from ports that uplink to other devices...such as firewalls.

While POE is "supposed to be auto negotiate"..it's not a perfect technology.

 

[occsean]

Yup..Rob confirmed and sent me links showing me other instances. Good thing I have 7 other ports to work with. He did offer to replace the switch for me, but I have to deploy in a few days and the timing doesn't work out. Lesson learned. I've since disabled PoE on every port but the two needed.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah....it should still run reliably even though 1x port cooked. An example of the benefit of having many additional ports which are flexible in how you assign them.

There is a micro fuse on each NIC...so when a surge comes up stream, the fuse takes the whack...preventing the surge from continuing to travel up into the system board and affect other components. Many other firewalls would simply cook totally. We have at least 2x Nexgen units out there which had the micro fuse save the unit, and we just move the patch cable over...and "drag 'n drop" the interfaces in the web GUI..presto, up and running again!

Gotta keep aware of POE....in the older days, most brands/devices you have to turn it on via each port and configure the type. As newer devices come out trying to reach the beginner market (like the Unifi product line...meant for ease of setup/management) the "plug and play" approach has all this auto negotiation set....so every port can light up. Can be risky.

 

[Nexgenappliances]

Micro fuses to the rescue! A system built from commodity hardware would have been fried completely. PoE can be dangerous, never trust auto features on any PoE switch.