Unable to register Dell Inspiron 13 7000 Series to fog server

Sebastian Roth

“Start PXE over IPv4” is UEFI enabled, I am pretty sure. undionly.kpxe does not work in UEFI mode! Please make sure you change dhcpd.conf (ipxe.efi), restart the DHCP service (sudo service isc-dhcp-server restart on ubuntu) and bootup your client again. Make sure the client was turned completely off! Pay attention to the messages you see. It should say:

...
Server IP address is 192.168.1.1
NBP filename is ipxe.efi
...

I have to admit that I am not absolutely sure if others have been successful with USB NICs in UEFI mode yet…

george1421

Based on my limited experience with UEFI, IF the bios is in UEFI mode and the legacy ROMS are disabled in the bios AND secure boot is turned off. If these conditions are met then you enter the bios with the USB NIC installed and can see the USB NIC in the selectable devices for booting then that USB NIC should be supported for UEFI booting.

You should be able to press F12 during the bios post test to bring up the boot menu, from there you should be able to select the USB network adapter for booting, it should be in the UEFI section of the boot menu not under BIOS. Again if these conditions are met you must use the ipxe (boot kernel) that ends in efi. Now there may need to be a specific one for that usb driven NIC, you would see this after the file has been downloaded to the target computer as the kernel boots, you may get network communication issues.

Warrender6

@Sebastian-Roth
I changed the dhcpd.conf to ipxe.efi instead auf undionly.kpxe again and I got an other error as you can see in the picture.

@george1421
UEFI mode is on and secure boot is turned off. I interrupted during booting by pressing F12 and chose the network-Adapter IPv4

Warrender6

Here are two files of wireshark showing the tftp and bootp traffic during booting. Now the dchpd.conf is changed to ipxe.efi. As you can see in the tftp-File there is an error: The ipxe.efi file could not be found.
Do i need to install something? I just did an upgrade from fog 0.32 to 1.2 and it is the first time that i use the fog server with uefi.

1_1448436922402_fog_bootp2.pcapng.pcap
0_1448436922402_fog_tftp2.pcapng.pcap

Edit:
These files are in /tftpboot

george1421

I’m wondering 2 things here.

First, if you use another computer can you use tftp client to download that file. We want to make sure the permissions on that boot file is not blocking access. You can use another linux computer or a windows computer if you install the tftp client (built in to windows 7+).

Second, it worked with undionly.kpxe and now with the ipxe.efi it doesn’t. Make sure there is not a blank space on either side of the text in the dhcp server configuration. I’m not seeing anything strange in the pcap files you supplied.

Sebastian Roth

ipxe.efi is not part of FOG 1.2.0. I am sorry, should have thought of this earlier!!!

cd /tftpboot
sudo wget -O ipxe.efi "http://sourceforge.net/p/freeghost/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/packages/tftp/ipxe.efi?format=raw"
sudo chown fog ipxe.efi

Then try booting the client again. As I said USB NICs in UEFI mode is definitely an advanced topic and you might run into new issues within iPXE. Probably best if you can take a picture if things go wrong.

And remember my first post about the console command in the boot menu. I guess you need to comment this in FOG 1.2.0 to make ipxe.efi work. You might want to look into FOG trunk as well. Probably best if you have a spare machine where you could setup FOG trunk to see if this works out of the box for your USB NIC device.

Warrender6

Thank you very much! It works!

Is it possible to use ipxe.efi and undionly.kpxe with one dhcp-Server? I just konw that you can use static dhcp like this f. e.:
host dell-client {
file name=ipxe.efi
hardware ethernet 00:02:c3:d0:e5:83;
fixed-address 40.175.42.254;
}

Wenn the dell client boot the fog-menu I have to enter the ip of the tftp-Server. Can I automate this?

george1421

Yes it is possible. There is a wiki that shows how to do this (I will look in a minute). The idea is that the dhcp server looks at the bootp request to find out the kind of client just asked for an IP address. If an EFI client asks for an IP address it sends the boot file name ipxe.efi file if it is a bios client then it sends undionly.kpxe.

Let me see if I can find it.

[Edit] Here you go: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/BIOS_and_UEFI_Co-Existence The arch type of efi x86 is 00006 and efi x64 is 00007 [/Edit]

Tom Elliott

I’m solving the thread as a solution for the problem was found. You can continue to talk about different things in here, but I’d actually recommend creating another thread. Storing obscure/unrelated information that doesn’t directly pertain to the question at hand works, but is also very difficult to find for other users as it may not have a title that correlates to what they were searching for.

Again, you’re free to do as you wish, but I am marking this thread as solved.

Warrender6

I was to fast and wrote that it works, but it still doesn’t work - sorry for that.
The fog-menu appears now, but I can´t register the dell-client or clone the client, if I do a pre-staging.

Tom Elliott

What files are you using? I usually see that panic if somebody is trying to use unmatching files (64 bit kernel with 32 bit init, or vice versa.)

Sebastian Roth

Hmmm, I keep forgetting how old 1.2.0 is. Kernel panic might be coming up because 1.2.0 is missing the initrd=init.xz kernel option. Or it is the kernel/init mismatch as Tom suggested. Which kernel version do you use by the way? (file /var/www/fog/service/ipxe/bzImage - if you see bzImage/init.xz being loaded on client bootup - otherwise bzImage32)

As I already said - you might want to look into setting up a FOG trunk server (don’t upgrade your running system but setup another machine for testing this) which comes with all the newest things included. https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Upgrade_to_trunk

If you don’t want to be bothered with the very latest stuff (bug fixes every day!) you better checkout SVN version 4103 which is pretty stable (svn co -r 4103 https://svn.code.sf.net/p/freeghost/code/trunk)

Warrender6

In /var/www/fog/service/ipxe I see these files:

At first I upgraded to SVN version, but I´am not completely sure, if this Version is installed and works. Where can I see if I´m using SVN version?
Then I upgraded to FOG-Trunk. I did a snapshot from the VM. So I can test, up- and downgrade easily. Unfortunately I got a lot of problems: Apache 2 and tftp didn’t start with a lot of errors. So I don´t want to upgrade to the trunk version at work.

Sebastian Roth

@Warrender6 From what I can see in the two screenshots those files are probably on the same system (date and time). So I guess this is still FOG 1.2.0. I am still not sure if you can make this work with 1.2.0 but what is very clear is that init.xz is too small. Somehow got damaged?? You can download a copy straight from here: http://sourceforge.net/p/freeghost/code/HEAD/tree/tags/1.2.0/packages/web/service/ipxe/init.xz?format=raw

If you want to go FOG trunk we need more information on what went wrong. Exact error messages!

Unable to register Dell Inspiron 13 7000 Series to fog server

196

11.7k

17.2k

154.7k