Dell XR11 No Bootable Media

[fhhowdy]

Disclaimer: I’m very new to FOG.

I do have the FOG instance working for several machines on the network – and they work great. But I’ve got some Dell hardware that isn’t taking to it too well.

— The issue —

I’ve got a dell xr11 server that is configured for PXE boot. It’s connecting to the FOG server and downloading the NBP file, but after the successful NBP file download, I get the message:

Downloading NBP file...
NBP file downloaded successfully.

Boot Failed: PXE Device 1  

No boot device available or Operating System detected.  Please ensure a compatible bootable media is available.

I’m assuming that maybe the PXE image being sent to the machine is not compatible with it, but I’m not sure how to figure out how to troubleshoot it.

Any tips/suggestions would be very much appreciated.

[george1421]

@fhhowdy This error looks similar to what I might expect when secure boot is enabled. Check the firmware settings to ensure that secure boot is disabled, which will allow the FOG boot manager (iPXE) to load.

Something else to keep in mind is that FOG’s imaging operating system (FOS), is really targeted towards laptop/desktop computers and not servers. Servers often use hardware not commonly found on workstation class computers. I’m not saying it won’t work, we will just need to be mindful if things act abnormally. Machine class isn’t the issue here, because your server is not booting into the boot manager. The problem I mentioned may come when you pick an action from the boot menu.

[fhhowdy]

@george1421

Thanks for the prompt reply. I realize that I’m in a slight corner of the use-cases here. I have a lab where I’m wanting to jump between multiple images of hypervisors for a couple of Dell machines (mostly server class – XR11, XR12, XR4000 series).

The secure boot settings are in the Boot Settings -> System Security -> Secure Boot portion of the BIOS.

My machine has this disabled and is configured for a non-secure UEFI boot.

I’m wondering if sending a different image to the machine might be possible. Where does FOG select the image that is selected? Where are these images stored?

Thanks again for a great project.

[george1421]

@fhhowdy said in Dell XR11 No Bootable Media:

For FOG imaging having uefi secure boot disabled is a requirement.

I’m wondering if sending a different image to the machine might be possible. Where does FOG select the image that is selected? Where are these images stored?

This explaination will take a little setup. In fog you create image definitions in the webui. Then you register a computer with FOG. This lets fog capture the target computers hardware info and stores it in the database. Part of the registration process it asks what image do you want to connect this computer to. Now when you configured a FOG image capture task and pxe boot the target computer the target computer will know what image location to store the captured image into. For this example lets say your target computer had a debian image so you just captured that and stored the image in the debian image definition. Now you go and create a rocky linux image definition. You can now update your target computer’s image definition to point to the rocky linux image definition from debian. The debian image is still there, but now we are going to capture the rocky linux image into FOG. So lets say we repeat that process for Windows 2019 and 2020. So now you have 4 captured images and 1 target computer defined in FOG.

Lets say you pxe boot a new computer, and boot into the FOG iPXE menu. From the fog ipxe menu you can pick Deploy Image and then deploy any of those 4 captured images to this new computer. System builders use this method, that I call “Load and Go” You can deploy an image to a target computer without registering it with FOG. You lose FOG’s management capabilities, but for system builders once they load the OS they will never see the computer again. But in your case you should register all of your computers with FOG for post deployment management capabilities. Don’t misunderstand, you can still use the pxe boot -> deploy image route with registered computers too.