@djgalloway said in The DDP package file was not found or could not be read:

The DDP package file was not found or could not be read. Entering Safe Mode

This specific issue is the default fog kernel doesn’t contain the required firmware that is required to communicate with your E810 network adapter.

If I built a custom fog kernel for you in the past you already know this, but for the folks that find this post in the future… The fog developers in an effort to make a super fast imaging engine designed it using the 90/10 rule in that they will build a kernel for 90% of the deployments (which mean desktop computers) and leaving the rest for one-off builds. The supermicro servers or servers in general are in a different class than desktop/workstation computers. The desktop/workstation computers are pretty much the same even from different vendors. So the 90% rule has almost all of the hardware drivers built into the kernel. Servers class computers on the other hand have specialty components to aid in redundancy, performance, or monitoring (that other 10%) that are not typically found in the workstation class computers. Natively supporting that remaining 10% means almost doubling the size of the FOS engine kernel as well as having an impact on imaging speed. That is why the native FOS kernel doesn’t have every hardware driver built in. In your case the Intel E810 is a server class network adapter with QSFP28 ports (not something typically found in a workstation class computer).

With that said, I’m sure either the FOG kernel developers or I can create a one-off kernel for you. I will need to resetup my development environment because I just built a new linux server and haven’t move the files over from my old server, so it may take me a day or so to be in the position to create a current kernel with the required firmware built in for the nic.

@CoNickt @avh2025
Not all usb ethernet adapters are created equal. I would usually say to just bite the bullet and get the vendor specific adapter but it looks like you already did that. I have usb and usb-c adapters that work fine but different uefi firmwares behave differently. i.e. Microsoft surface just has to have its surface branded adapter for native boot to work. HP will work sometimes with the dell or lenovo pxe capable usb-c adapters. We also recently got 2 different hp laptop models where one had to use snponly.efi and the other was fine with ipxe.efi. I maintain a table of models and which adapters work with what we have. Lots of things do just work once you have a collection of usb adapters. Unfortunately, it’s an issue of hardware vendors adding proprietary limitations, but luckily between fog and ipxe you can typically get it working pretty smooth.

Generally if you’re able to pxe boot though, it should find the adapter within pxe. It could be a case of it being too “new” an adapter that requires a different driver not in ipxe. In that case though, I would try using snponly.efi as it may have different behavior with less things loaded in the pxe side. It may also be a driver or setting needed in ipxe that could be handled in a custom compile of ipxe, there’s some info on that here https://docs.fogproject.org/en/latest/compile_ipxe_binaries

It’s also possible to use a tool such as rEFInd to get to a uefi cli console. If you load the ipxe.efi and or snponly.efi and then if you can obtain them the efi driver for the adapter you can do a fs0: to enter the usb disk (it may be fs1: or fs2: you gotta ls on each disk to find the right one) then load usb-network-driver.efi then ipxe.efi to ensure the usb network driver is loaded in the efi for that session and then boot direct to the pxe file which will start the fog network boot. It’s a bit of a hassle but it usually works for me when all else fails. I have an old startech usb 2 ethernet adapter I do this with. This has worked universally but it’s not an ideal solution, but can be poc that it can be done on any device.

I hope my rant was helpful.

@rodluz I know you were talking to the other person, but if you like you can send me the kernels for testing.

I think I have the same problem and I want to be sure of exactly what I need to do (I don’t know if there is a step-by-step tutorial…).

I boot with a USB-C network adapter on an HP Elitebook. It finds FOG, I have the menu, I choose to deploy an image, and then I get this error message:

IMG_20251106_162705.jpg

Is this the problem in question?
If so, what exactly should I do? I see (link @FlorianLenz ) that I need to replace two files with the new ones, then run the .sh. But isn’t that dangerous for other network boots?

Thank you in advance for your help.

@phant0mbot said in Dell OptiPlex 3000 Thin Client:

have tried both SAN and GRUB exit options

boot loader == snponly.efi

These are in contradiction with each other. SAN boot and Grub are bios boot methods. snponly.efi is a uefi boot loader. Since you are getting into the fog iPXE menu we can assume the hardware IS uefi based since it is booting snp.efi. Try a uefi exit mode of rEFInd (refind) to see if that will boot from the hard drive. The default value can be set globally in the fog configuration->fog settings page. Don’t force a bios attempted boot from a uefi booted computer, that never works.

@Tom-Elliott thanks for the quick response. No joy though.

I’ve been and tried an Ubuntu live iso with a 6.14 kernel from the Ubuntu Concept Snapdragon Elite branch (https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/faq-ubuntu-25-04-on-snapdragon-x-elite/61016) and even that doesn’t boot - though it gets as far as telling me it can’t create a device tree. So I guess I’m just going to have to be patient while upstream gets this whole SoC working.

@Tom-Elliott
Of course, it’s disabled. 😉

@rodluz Updating the kernel to the latest version helped; the computers are finally being restored at full and consistent speeds, for both unicast and multicast deployments. Thank you for your help.

Dear Tom,

Thanks, and this is what I figured. At least I can pxe boot it and capture the image now, if I switch it to “AHCI/NVMe” mode, and switch back to “RAID” mode to boot the single NVMe drive.

I made this known so we can reach out to Dell and possibly have this changed as it actually doesn’t need this “RAID” mode.

Also we still have to disable secure boot on any computer either HP or Dell to get the pxe boot to work.

We did manage to use FOG to capture a RAID from an HPE DL380 Proliant Gen10 RAID controller and use that to load Windows Server 2022 now, so it does seem the kernel is the issue here on this intel motherboard RAID.

Regards,

Matt

@george1421

thank you for your great answer. You are completely right, it is a 17-x104ng, not a fg. It was an error of me 🙂

The needed hardware id is VEN_10EC&DEV_8136

Hope that helps

Thx,
mchristo

@Donutsrule5

OK lets see if we can boot from a usb drive. This tutorial will instruct you on how to build a usb boot image. https://forums.fogproject.org/post/69606 the google drive link below will take you to step 7 in the thread.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1psCrPVzBTvlakLkCMvhdoScAEZp1CKE6/view?usp=drive_link

Once you build the usb boot drive, take the kernel and init.xz from your current version of fog and replace the ones on the flash drive with the ones in from the FOG server. The files are in /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe directory.

Once you have the usb drive ready, pxe boot into the grub menu on the flash drive, then go into debug mode. After several pages of text you need to clear with the enter key you will be dropped at a fos linux command prompt. If you can get that far then fos linux is OK and the problem is probably with ipxe or the handoff between the two.

If you want to image with the flash drive, schedule the task in the fog server BEFORE you usb boot and select option 1 from the menu. If you get it out of sequence you will get an error that says something about Null. Basically its saying you don’t have a task scheduled on the fog server so there is nothing to do. Lets see if we can get it to boot this way.

@skyhawk3355 I remember awhile ago I needed to create a one-off kernel for a system that had a 486 cpu. I checked but I don’t have that kernel any more.

I just recompiled the linux 6.6.85 for a 586 based CPU. I can recompile for a 486, but I don’t know if that is going to get us anything better.

Here is 6.6.85 586 version
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GAzFjbtpDVXXCRpe6bIZ5mwySSXeDHko/view?usp=drive_link

Here is 6.6.85 586 where I stripped out some drivers like scsi, nvme, uncommon network drivers, virtualization drivers, etc. I was able to strip out over 1MB of kernel size from the previous one above. Did I through out too much?? YMMV.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13dE7BLgofsFiNJj_Q8nLDknplRbWRqkJ/view?usp=drive_link

@Ced58 I use this model. It’s best to get either the official Lenovo usb c ethernet adapter or the proprietary Lenovo adapter for the special ethernet port on these. Also in the bios there’s a Mac pass through option that you want to set to internal or second Mac address. With the latest version of fog and kernel it should see that internal mac even if you share an adapter for imaging multiple of that device.

@rodluz said in Lenovo ThinkPad L14 Gen 5 - kernel panic:

@jflash Great! Did you use the default kernel from FOG after the update, or did you use the kernel from my repo?

I don’t try older kernel, just put new one 🙂

@pilipp_edv I had a very similar issue to this a while back but it was with an HP laptop. It turned out to be a hardware defect. I was able to get the motherboard replaced under warranty, so maybe you can too for this laptop.

Hello All! (Especially Wilsol)

I used the top configuration ideas from Wilsol, and before I could get through the entire list, darned thing started working. (yeah probably secure boot, thanks Tom for pointing us in the right direction)

Thanks to everyone for the assist.

-Jim

@aurfalien If you are still on this quest. What we would need is the hardware id of this network adapter. You can get this from windows in the device manager. We would need the vend and device IDs.

If in linux then use lspci -nn to get the device IDs. They will be 2 sets of 4 character hex numbers within the square brackets separated by a colon. i.e. [8086:1b4e].

With that code we can see if there are standard linux kernel drivers for this network adapter.

I got this fixed.
i think they fixed it without me but i had an open ticket and was talking iPXE and swapping files and all sorts.

Anyway new firmware 1.21 now working.