Ever got a 160kg heavy BladeCenter with 14 shining BladeServer inside and felt horrified after not beeing able to install your favourite OS? ( NO its not $Windoze )
Hell of a week!
after burning several isos with all kinds of BSD flavours - to name them FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD - and all of them didn’t succeed during install. the worst: the favourite FreeBSD didn’t boot at all. The other BSDs where not able to bring up their NIC for network-install.
so experimented couple days, set up pxeboot (worked!) but the NIC during install sadly claimed: ‘no carrier’.
Burning another ISO with Belenix (OpenSolaris - live-cd) finally managed to have the NIC available after booting - so there was no chance to send back the whole BladeCenter with a reason like : ‘hey the switch-module is f***ed’.
Finally: it was that easy:
during install set network-configuration manually with defining the NICs media manual:
ifconfig bge0 media 1000baseSX mediaopt full-duplex
instead of default ‘autoselect’
and up/down the interface:
ifconfig bge0 down_ , _ifconfig bge0 up
finally: status: active