Hi all,
I did something dumb that cost me some time. Sharing issue and the fix to hopefully save others some time.
BLUF: If you are silly enough (like me) to make the mistake of establishing a sole NIC PSI passthrough which cuts access to the UI, save some time by heading straight to the bios to disable virtualisation support before troubleshooting your return to glory!
Situation: Upgraded to Fangtooth. Started exploring the system and testing the new ‘instance’ features with the aim of running OPNSense to determine whether feasible and secure to run on one system. Awaiting the deliver of dual port 10Gbps Intel NIC to handle the segmentation/traffic.
Issue: In a moment of utter stupidity, decided it would be a good idea to passthrough the sole onboard NIC to the ‘instance’. This promptly kicked me out of the UI. No problem I thought, I can just fix it through SSH… nope.
Action: First of all I tried ‘midclt’ commands but shell did not recognise the [$midclt call *], I tried very many variations of the ‘method’ but each time got 'method does not exist. Then I reset the config and then re-established UI access my uploading a recent config file. It worked for a while, but I awoke to the same issue. I then reset and tried to delete the instance while I still had access to the UI. The interaction prompted the passthrough and kicked me off. Lastly, I disabled virtualisation support within bios. Success.
Result: If this happens to you, I recommend that you skip the preamble and head straight to bios settings. For my Dell Precision T7810 bios, I first disable trusted execution, which then allowed me to deselect all other CPU virtualisation features. A restart then allowed me to head into the ‘instance’ menu without losing control. I deleted the NIC from the device menu, and then decided to scorched earth the VM, to start from scratch.
I hope that my adventure in stupidity helps any other unfortunate souls get out of the time wasting cycle. I will hopefully be the only dumb one and stand ready for your mockery! 