Building FOS to include Wi-Fi support?

[lucancurtismahoney]

Hi all

Our newest machines from HP do not have built in Ethernet. However, they do support iPXE over Wi-Fi. I am able to boot to the FOG Menu, up to “Full Host Registration and Inventory”, but then I am not able to continue with registration and imaging. It is my understanding that this process is performed by FOS. I have cloned the Git repo of FOS and I am prepared to build using custom components, but I am unsure what kernel options I need to enable and what packages to include to make this work over Wi-Fi.

I am aware of a thread on here from several years ago with these processes detailed, but the attached files are no longer available.

Thanks for any insight you can provide.

[george1421]

@lucancurtismahoney First let me start with the yada-yada-yada. Imaging over wifi is not supported by the developers of FOG. Imaging over wifi has its use cases but also is not advised because wifi is a shared resource and your entire wifi network will suffer if you try to image over wifi. You would be better served to get a supported (by the manufacturer) usb ethernet adapter and pxe boot over that.

With that said it might be possible to image over wifi if FOS is configured in an (unsupported) way. It will require a custom FOS Linux kernel and some tweaks to the virtual hard drive to add in the needed bits to configure wifi.

Below is a FOG USB debug image that contains a modified bzImage and init.xz files. Use rufus to burn to a 1GB usb drive. The image is less than 500MB so don’t waste a large usb on this boot image.

Understand this boot image WILL NOT WORK out of the box. We will use this for debugging your network adapter. Many network adapters need specific drivers to work with a linux kernel. We will find out what that firmware is with this debug usb.

1. Use rufus to write the image file to the usb drive.
2. Edit the grub.cfg file with notepad++ (not windows notepad) its located in the /boot/grub directory. At the top set the IP address of your fog server, and half way down the variable add in your wifi ssid and password. Remove the curly braces.
3. Save the config file and then take it to your target computer.
4. USB boot this image file on the target computer. You may see some error messages about networking, but that is expected.
5. After a few screens you need to clear by pressing the enter key you will be dropped to a linux command prompt.
6. See if you can see the wifi adapter with this command ip a s If you see something like wlXXXXX then the driver is loaded and you are done.
7. If you only see the loop back (lo) adapter then continue.
8. Key in the following command it will look through the startup messages for anything that mentions firmware. grep -i -e firmw /var/log/messages My bet is there will be a message from the intel wireless (iwlwifixxxxx) saying that it needs a specific firmware to load. Take a clear snapshot of the name of the firmware name with a mobile phone and post it here. I will patch the kernel with the required firmware and upload it with additional instructions.

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