Black screen when attempting to Perform full registration and inventory on Dell Latitude 5580

[lukebarone]

@george1421

if substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 15, 5) = "00000" {
        # BIOS client
            filename "undionly.kpxe";
        }
#    elsif substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 15, 5) = "00006" {
#        # EFI client 32 bit
#        filename   "ipxe32.efi";
#    }
        else {
            # default to EFI 64 bit
            filename   "ipxe.efi";
        }

I do not have any 32-bit UEFI machines, so I disabled that one section. I think that since I see the menu, it is grabbing one of those two files successfully…?

[george1421]

@lukebarone Well nuts, we typically see that people when the upgrade from 0.30 to 1.30+ they leave the boot file to pxelinux.0 That file will cause an issue between bzImage and init.zx

We are wHittling down the list of suspects to either 1. That workstation is crap 2. Your fog server needs to be junked and rebuilt from the ground up. I’m leading toward #1.

I’m not sure this next suggestion is going to help any. But I wonder if there is another bad actor involved with the pxe booting process? Like a proxydhcp server. At this point I am running out of ideas. We could capture a pcap of the pxe booting process but I’m not sure if that will give us any additional information we don’t already have.

[lukebarone]

@george1421 Just for S&G’s, I went into the Fog Debug menu. Running an ls on the /bin/ folder, I see a bunch of fog scripts. Do you want me to manually try running the fog.man.reg script from the shell? Would that help with what works and what doesn’t?

EDIT: I tried executing fog.man.reg from the Debug menu. Entered the information, selected the image / group / snapins / other configurations, and then rebooted. It grabbed the image automatically, as expected.

So it seems there is a disconnect between the boot menu option for “Full Host Registration” vs going into Debug, and manually executing the script.

[Sebastian Roth]

@lukebarone As Tom said it looks like your web directory has at least two different versions of FOG running. This can cause an issue I reckon.

To see which kernel version you really have when booting up a client please schedule a debug task and run uname -a when you get to the shell.

[lukebarone]

@sebastian-roth

uname -a
Linux fogclient.localdomain 4.13.4 #2 SMP Oct 18 15:26:04 EDT 2017 x86_64 GNU/Linux

So it is grabbing the new Kernel that was installed…

[lukebarone]

@sebastian-roth I guess the other question is, can I just simply delete one of the FOG folders, and it would be “uninstalled”?

[Sebastian Roth]

@lukebarone said in Black screen when attempting to Perform full registration and inventory on Dell Latitude 5580:

I guess the other question is, can I just simply delete one of the FOG folders, and it would be “uninstalled”?

In theory you can. But which one is the most current one? I’d suggest backing up and the deleting both. Then re-run the installer to have a fresh clean one. If you have the fog-client in use you better put the certificate stuff in place again after the installer is done (you find that in ....../management/other/).

[Tom Elliott]

@sebastian-roth The public certificate is regenerated every install, and that’s the only file stored in management/other/ (the public certificate for the private key).

[lukebarone]

@tom-elliott Me are stupid -.-

Under the Fog Configuration -> iPXE Menu Configuration -> fog.reginput -> Boot Options:, I had " pci=noacpi" added for some reason. I removed it (after seeing that it wasn’t there on Quick Registration), and I can now boot directly to the Registration screen!

I can’t wait for the spare time to just rebuild a FOG server from scratch and copy over the machines I need… -.- Sorry to have wasted so much time with everyone on this issue

[george1421]

@lukebarone Hey, we are glad you found it because we couldn’t understand how this was only happening for full registration.

In the future don’t add kernel parameters in the ipxe menu. Either add them globally in the fog configuraitons page or targeted in the host configuration page. Either way great job finding it.

[lukebarone]

@george1421 I’m 99% sure it was the suggestion of something I found on the forums a long time ago, but simply forgot.

Like I said, once everything calms down, I’m planning on rebuilding my FOG machine anyways, and blast away old images, especially since I can drop driver packs in now