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"Create OPNsense VM on ProxMox" Saga

#networking
  1. Created a VM with hardware from information in one of the many online tutorials on this topic, that is a few years old, and recommends 8GB HDD space on the VM
  2. Started the VM with the OPNsense installer DVD ISO mounted on virtual dvdrom drive
  3. Went through installer steps to the end where the installer says No space left on device
  4. Luckily... I found a forum post where someone mentions the swap partition alone consumes 8GB now, and the VM HDD needs to be 20-30GB
  5. Searched ProxMox docs and find the option to expand the size of disk, and enlarge the virtual HDD to 30GB
  6. Restarted, but HDD boot "bit" is already set from the "swap partition only" failed install, so the ISO installer won't "try again" and offers no option to wipe the HDD and start over.
  7. Decided to drop and re-create the HDD, so I "detached" it, but didn't notice that it hangs around until you "remove" it also, in a separate step.
  8. Added a new "blank" HDD... 32GB this time
  9. Did another full boot from ISO -> install process... which seemed to work this time (found enough disk space for swap AND install)
  10. The reboot at the end boots from installer ISO again. None of the tutorials I found mention that the ISO image must be unmounted before the reboot.
  11. Stopped the VM and unmounted the ISO from virtual dvdrom drive
  12. Restarted the VM but now the boot process / BIOS won't do anything but PXE network boot. 13 Noticed the initial "unused" HDD and used "remove" to finish getting rid of it.
  13. Restarted the VM and went through install process again (not sure why boot bit on the virtual HDD wasn't blocking it this time). Unmounted the ISO from the virtual dvdrom drive again, and rebooted again, but the BIOS is still skipping any attempt to boot from the HDD and tries to do PXE network boot again.
  14. Assumed that no boot from HDD might be because the attached HDD is the 2nd one added and has ID=1 (not 0). This might be adjacent to the actual problem (more on that later), but probably wasn't the actual cause.
  15. Detached AND "removed" ALL !@#$%^ virtual HDDs (seriously, why isn't there a prompt during "detach" for "do you also want to remove/delete?")
  16. Added a single, new, blank virtual HDD
  17. Remounted the install ISO in the virtual dvdrom drive
  18. Started VM and went through the console install process... AGAIN!!
  19. Unmounted the ISO before rebooting this time.
  20. Found that the boot / BIOS is STILL trying a network PXE boot, and skipping over booting from the virtual HDD.
  21. Googled "OPNsense won't boot after install in ProxMox"
  22. Found MANY suggestions that there's a VM option called *Pre-Enroll keys * that needs to be disabled because OPNsense doesn't support the "secure boot" that goes with that.
  23. After looking fruitlessly for where to set that option, on an existing or new VM, eventually put it together that Pre-Enroll keys is only an setting on the UEFI boot option, and because I had selected the default (SeaBIOS), I was never going to find that setting, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with my issu.
  24. Decided to ask ChatGPT what else could be going on. It rarely responds with anything that is directly relevant (or even technically correct), but sometimes it triggers a thought to check something I could have missed.
  25. ChatGPT confidently tells me that the boot order in the BIOS just needs to be switched around.
  26. I initially shrug ChatGPT's answer because the ISO image bootup options goes away with unmounting it from the virtual dvdrom drive, and PXE boot is always supposed to be last in the order, after a hard drive.
  27. I thought it couldn't hurt to see what ProxMox was following for boot order settings, so I took a look at the VM "options" (where boot order is hiding because SeaBIOS doesn't actually have a BIOS user interface.
  28. I found that the scsi HDD was not even enabled as a boot device at all... AND it was !@#$% LAST in the order.
    • ROOT CAUSE: Having to delete the original (too small) HDD and add a bigger one meant that the original virtio0 device, which WAS in the boot list, and WAS first when the VM was initially created, ended up last in the order, and not selected as a boot device at all.
  29. So... I corrected the boot device selection and order to re-include virtio0 as the first (potentially) bootable device, and reset the VM one more time (because it was still running and looping on the PXE boot attempts).
  30. The behavior didn't change with the reset... which I discovered means that ProxMox doesn't bother reloading changed boot-order / device settings on a reset.
  31. Clicked stop, and then clicked start on the VM to force it to use the new boot order.
  32. Finally, all of the planets were forced back into alignment, and OPNsense booted up to... at last... let me get to "Step 2" of setting it up.

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