[SOLVED] Question about boot order in home network

[iDurr]

Hi all!

I'm just getting into homelabbing and am seeing some strange behavior from my setup. I'm running pfSense on a Dell R210 II and a Brocade ICX-6450-24P switch. My setup is the following:

Verizon -> pfSense on Dell R210 II -> Brocade switch (layer 2 firmware on boot)

The Dell R210 II and the Brocade are both on the same power strip in a 12U rack. I've flashed the latest Layer 2 firmware to the primary boot partition on the Brocade as pfSense will be handling Layer 3. In testing to see what happens when I manually turn the power on and off, I can't hit my default gateway when I do a cold boot. I have some idea as to why this might be happening:

1. The Brocade is running flash memory vs the Dell which is using a HDD. In the bootup process, the Brocade is ready to go before the Dell. By the time the Dell is fully up and running and pfSense has started, the Brocade has been sitting ready for about a minute. This makes me think that there might be a race condition happening here, although I'm not an expert in networking so that may or may not be an issue, idk.

2. Something with the settings in the Brocade on startup. I've set my environment variables to be in line with my internal network (ipaddr, netmask, gatewayip) but they might not be getting loaded properly initially, idk.

Thank you all in advance!

 

[kanewolf]

Hi all!

I'm just getting into homelabbing and am seeing some strange behavior from my setup. I'm running pfSense on a Dell R210 II and a Brocade ICX-6450-24P switch. My setup is the following:

Verizon -> pfSense on Dell R210 II -> Brocade switch (layer 2 firmware on boot)

The Dell R210 II and the Brocade are both on the same power strip in a 12U rack. I've flashed the latest Layer 2 firmware to the primary boot partition on the Brocade as pfSense will be handling Layer 3. In testing to see what happens when I manually turn the power on and off, I can't hit my default gateway when I do a cold boot. I have some idea as to why this might be happening:

1. The Brocade is running flash memory vs the Dell which is using a HDD. In the bootup process, the Brocade is ready to go before the Dell. By the time the Dell is fully up and running and pfSense has started, the Brocade has been sitting ready for about a minute. This makes me think that there might be a race condition happening here, although I'm not an expert in networking so that may or may not be an issue, idk.

2. Something with the settings in the Brocade on startup. I've set my environment variables to be in line with my internal network (ipaddr, netmask, gatewayip) but they might not be getting loaded properly initially, idk.

Thank you all in advance!

Your "default gateway" only exists on the R210. It doesn't have an IP until the R210 boots. There is no "race" condition, the IP simply doesn't exist.