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JJ Fullmer

@george1421 said in Broken iPXE boot loader:

@Mightmar I wonder if the devs for iPXE has changed something in the ipxe source code to cause this error message about autoexec.ipxe not found. This should be supplied by the fog project add on files. I’ll take a look at the compiler to see if something has changed. You should not see this error.

Reinstalling 1.5.10 will fix the error of the latest build of iPXE. Also you mentioned about a later version of FOG. Yes you can install that over 1.5.10 without issue. It should also have updated (but not the newest version of iPXE).

This is the first post I found searching autoexec.ipxe so replying here for future searchers.

This was an addition in a recent ipxe version, and is meant to be a way to add ipxe based functionality without needing to recompile ipxe in order to edit an embedded script (https://github.com/ipxe/ipxe/discussions/1237#discussioncomment-9847219), I can’t find the post/doc again but I remember reading in one place that ipxe added it as part of the hopes of getting a signed ipxe shim so users could use the signed shim and then use this script to add what they can’t embed. While technically we can create a blank file in /tftpboot/ i.e. just

#!ipxe

which will remove the error during boot, this can then cause kernel panics when loading into FOS. Why it does this is a bit of a mystery at the moment, maybe it’s adding to or replacing another part of our pxe menu scripts that causes something in loading the kernels to lose access to ramdisk drivers. But adding it can break everything, so for the time being, just ignore the error.

soscrafts01

Hi,

i have in school one computer class without stored in bios windows pro key and i try to assign to host a windows 11 pro key but for the whole class when i deploy image more than half pc have some error about the isntalling windows was interrupted i think it might be problem with unattend file on image or that i wrote one windows key when i was creating the image but if it was a problem i think only one pc would imaged well but always few pc is imaged well the funniest thinks is i make image on this same device which is in class but in another class where we have another devices i did not have this problem i sometimes i had issues with to old or too new bios but this time all class have this same id of bios

Well where i need to look for problems? in unattend file or in that i put key of winmdows 11 pro to distribution image ?

rogalskij

@Clebboii A workaround that always worked for me that was recommended by Tom was to use the full DNS name rather than the IP address. I was initially logging into the UI through the IP, and found that very same issue. When he mentioned it and I started using the full DNS name, the issue went away.

JJ Fullmer

@gaptoothgonni Well darn, have you tried booting with snponly.efi instead of ipxe.efi? It wouldn’t make a ton of sense if that worked but something else to try.
If it’s booting to the wim though, it should just be getting the drivers from the wim unless ipxe somehow changes how they’re presented, which I don’t think it does but that’s also the only difference between where it’s working. Might be worth looking at https://github.com/ipxe/ipxe/discussions and seeing if anyone has had similar issues. Since you’re just using FOG to create the ipxe boot menu, it’s not likely anything within FOG that’s causing this. You could try ipxe’s pre-built boot files, though they won’t have the embedded fog stuff https://boot.ipxe.org/ but maybe will make a difference. There’s other ipxe efi files you can try too, or try an older one ( I think we still include some legacy ones in /tftpboot)

JJ Fullmer

@pilipp_edv That should be enough I imagine, thanks for being thorough. I’ll take a look at the kernel config when I get a chance.

JJ Fullmer

@pilipp_edv
Glad you got it figure out.
In case you aren’t aware, you can download that bzImage as a different name like bzImage-mmc and use that case sensitive name in the Host Kernel field on any host you have with the mmc and your other hosts can use the default latest.

Would you be willing to share more info on the make/model of these computers and or the make/model of the mmc controller and such? Although it could just be down to what driver versions are included by linux at the kernel level with different versions of the kernel, we can also check if there was a config change in what we include in the kernel between then and now that could have caused this.

JJ Fullmer

@chunter2 Ah, yes that would do it.
That just becomes the default value when creating new hosts.
If you set it via a group, it will update those values on all hosts in a given group, but it doesn’t do that dynamically/perpetually.

JJ Fullmer

@ramone As far as I am aware, no one ever volunteered to take up the docker image maintenance. It’s essentially dead.
I think it’s possible in theory, you would just need volumes for the fog directories that need to be static between updates like the database and images, though there would surely be other fun issues with ports to work out. I personally see the desire for it if you’re in an environment where you already have lots of containers as a standard in your infrastructure, but I like having it just on its own server.
Is it not an option to start with a docker image that doesn’t already have a database on the default port? Or are you saying the docker host already has a database on said port?
I’m also sure we could figure out using an external database as storagenodes already connect to an external database. I would think that using docker for adding storage nodes might make some sense as you could put them all on one server and use volumes to mount disks from different sources.
However, the more virtualization and containerization you add, the more complication arises. Already once just on a virtual server you may not be able to use multi-cast imaging unless you’re able to add igmp snooping in your virtual networking. I don’t know if containers have that same limitation or other limitations that could be introduced.

This isn’t really a great answer I realize, and I apologize for that, but there’s a lot to consider with changing infrastructure.

Anyway, something you might try is to create a /opt/fog/.fogsettings file before installing and put in these settings

snmysqlpass='password'
snmysqlhost='remoteHost'
snmysqluser='fogmaster'
mysqldbname='fog'

Then try the installer, no idea if it would work, but something to try as far as using an external database.

JJ Fullmer

@gaptoothgonni So while this can be done, FOG is designed to capture an image from where windows is already installed and sysprep’d, not to boot to a wim. Of course it can be done, but I just wanted to make sure that’s clarified.

All that said, doing it that way may or may not get past your problem, because it may just be a client pc bios setting.
If you manually boot to that iso on a usb on that pc, does it see the disks?
That message generally means it’s missing the storage driver.
Does the host you’re trying to deploy to have VMD/RAID enabled in the bios settings?
It is possible, and not even that hard if you’re already customizing the iso, to add the storage driver to the wim. I’ve never used NTLite, but in powershell you can mount the wim of the image with Mount-WindowsImage and use Add-WindowsDriver to add the inf you need to that image. You probably need to mount the boot.wim and setup.wim images and add it there too as you’re booting to the boot.wim and using winpe. This page might also be helpful https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/media-dynamic-update#update-windows-installation-media

I would also say, if you’re going this route, to consider making a autounattend.xml if NTLite doesn’t do that, as it can automate the install of windows and then have it kick things off into provisioning. We customize an iso like this and use it to create and capture our base image in FOG.

I got a little off topic there, TL;DR
Make sure the disks are seen if you boot to the iso manually, if they are not, then adjust the bios/uefi settings to use AHCI mode for disks as it works universally. If the disks are seen when manually booting, then something else is causing it not to see the local hardware.

JJ Fullmer

@chunter2 It does look like you’re on an older version of fog. Updating to the latest stable, dev-branch, or my favorite working-1.6 version may help.

But also, are you saying that you joined the domain, then unjoined and then captured an image of that? Generally you don’t want to join the domain where you’re capturing, it’s much cleaner if it’s never joined the domain.
Or are you saying you’re trying to re-join the domain on a normal host? This could be an issue on the host’s settings in fog, could that have been changed on accident? Maybe autofill from a password manager changed the domain and or domain join password?

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