Archive for July, 2012

Resize a FreeBSD Disk Running Under VMware

July 22, 2012 at 15:08 · Filed under FreeBSD

I have a FreeBSD guest as a VM under VMware Fusion on my MacBook Air. It was built before my disk went from 250g to 500g, so was small. A research software build blew the 8g boundary. So, what worked was as follows

boot from a FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso image
gpart delete -i 3 da0 (the swap)
gpart resize -i 2 -s 24g da0
gpart add -t freebsd-swap da0
growfs /da0p2

I see no reason this would not apply to vmware esxi on the servers

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DynaMIPS on FreeBSD on VMware ESXi

July 13, 2012 at 06:43 · Filed under FreeBSD, Routers & Routing

The simple approach to running DynaMIPS on FreeBSD guest under VMware did not work at all. No packets from the LAN reached the DynaMIPS ether interface.

24 hours later, and with the help of Iain and Rob, it was sorted.

It required two hacks as follows:

The first hack was running em1, the interface dynamips was using, through a custom vswitch that had promiscuous mode enabled.

The problem here was that this let packets through so well that it looped and multiplied them. Pings from the same ether LAN had TTLs as low as 220, delays of many seconds, and massive duplication of packets.

The second hack was running it through a bridge/tap interface on FreeBSD. In /etc/rc.conf lingo, that’s

   cloned_interfaces="bridge0 tap0"
   ifconfig_bridge0="addm em1 addm tap0"
   ifconfig_em1=up
   ifconfig_tap0=up

and then the dynagen conf file used

   fa0/0 = NIO_tap:/dev/tap0

Either hack alone did not work. It took both and one or more rubber chickens. The result looked like the following:

 
    .--------------------------.
    |                          |
    | .----------------------. |
    | |                      | |
    | | .------------------. | |
    | | |                  | | |
    | | |     DynaMIPS     | | |
    | | |                  | | |
    | | |                  | | |
    | | |           fa 0/0 | | |
    | | `--------------|---' | |
    | |                |     | |
    | |              tap0    | |
    | |  FreeBSD       |     | |
    | |             bridge0  | |
    | |                |     | |
    | |  em0          em1    | |
    | `---|------------|-----' |
    |     |            |       |
    |  vswitch      vswitch    |
    |     |            |       |
    |     `------------'       |
    |            |             |
    |  ESXi      |             |
    `------------|-------------'
                 |
        /--~~-----------~~--/
                LAN

The DynaGen configuration then looked like

  [localhost]
    [[7200]]
      model = 7200
      image = images/c7200-adventk9-mz-rpki26-v152_1_s_xe35_tr-bl30.unzip
      ram = 2048
      npe = npe-400
      idlepc = 0x6204bd2c
      ghostios = True
    [[router r0]]
      console = 2001
      aux = 3001
      fa0/0 = NIO_tap:/dev/tap0

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