X1 AIO Desktop - i7 vPro network issue with Intel I219-LM [was: Make new bzImage...]

[mandrade]

@Sebastian-Roth ,

I have tried the rom-omatic.eu guide to create a USB stick. When it boots it fails with "“could not connect to net0: input/output error”

I

[Sebastian Roth]

@mandrade What if you build a simple undionly.kkpxe with debug enabled http code and do normal PXE boot? Just move the original unidonly.kkpxe on your FOG/TFTP server out of the way and put that new binary in place…

[mandrade]

@Sebastian-Roth ,

I’ve been messing around with the BIOS settings etc. I’ve managed to get the machine to get here:

[Sebastian Roth]

@mandrade said:

I’ve been messing around with the BIOS settings

You got to be kidding?!? Possibly this was some kind of weird secruity chip issue again? Please can you reproduce which BIOS setting change did the trick?

About the DHCP error you see now: Do you have a onboard NIC in that machine or is it just the dock thingy? If it’s just that dock NIC-wise then it seems like the kernel actually does detect it as eth0. Please try using a dumb mini switch to connect between this client and your network. Possibly this might help you.

[Quazz]

@mandrade I would advise trying a different USB NIC, it seems like this one isn’t working properly given that it cannot read the device descriptor properly.

Unless… is this being plugged into a USB3 port? If so, try a USB2 port.

[mandrade]

@Quazz ,

That’s the thing, it’s a Onelink+ mini dock that I’m connecting with.

The there is also an onboard adaptor I assume is for the USB dongle.

[Sebastian Roth]

@mandrade said:

The there is also an onboard adaptor I assume is for the USB dongle.

I am not sure if I understand what you are trying to tell us. I was asking if there is some kind of “onboard” NIC within the device that might possibly be detected as eth0. While on the other hand the device descriptor error sounds a bit like it finds the USB NIC but fails to talk to it.

Have you ever tried booting any kind of live linux system (via USB or CDROM) on that machine?

PS: I am changing the title of this post now as I keep forgetting what this is about anyway…

[mandrade]

@Sebastian-Roth ,

I have thrown in the towel for now, seeing as there are only three laptops at this stage it should be ok.

So the full story is, there a two interfaces detected. An internal NIC which can be enabled/disabled by the BIOS(extends to USB dongle) and a second interface on the mini dock(The Realtek 8135 that was Mentioned).

The error device descriptor error comes up when the onboard NIC is enabled. As there is no USB dongle with an ethernet cable present we get device descriptor error. At least that’s my theory! Now, if I disable the onboard, and boot directly from the mini doc, it hangs intermittently. Sometimes on the bzImage and sometimes on the Init.xz. Believe it or not sometimes it goes all the way through but then eth0 was not detected.

Unfortunately these machines did not ship with the USB dongle. So I cannot test if that would work. I have also tried booting using a USB bootable drive but that also fails. I followed this document:

https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=USB_Bootable_Media

[mandrade]

Could also be a driver issue. The PXE boot off the mini dock seems to be a known problem:

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Enterprise-Client-Management/OneLink-Dock-No-Network-in-Windows-PE/td-p/3280897/page/2

The above forum is about a Lenovo Yoga and SCCM but the mini dock is the same. Same realtek driver. The Unix/Linux drivers availabled here:

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=13&PFid=56&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

[Sebastian Roth]

@mandrade said:

Now, if I disable the onboard, and boot directly from the mini doc, it hangs intermittently. Sometimes on the bzImage and sometimes on the Init.xz. Believe it or not sometimes it goes all the way through but then eth0 was not detected.

To me this definitely seems like an issue related to crappy hardware. Possibly the iPXE and kernel devs can work around this in their driver code but maybe not.

Could also be a driver issue. The PXE boot off the mini dock seems to be a known problem

Great find! Sure we could replace the official linux kernel driver r8152 with that one from the realtek website but you’d still see the hangs on iPXE trying to load the kernel most times. Although the iPXE devs have helped us a lot of times and added patches I kind of doubt that you can get them to add the realtek driver code to their project.

Have you tried my suggestion on using a dumb mini switch to connect between this client and your network yet? Possibly this might help.

[mandrade]

@Sebastian-Roth ,

I just tried your suggestion of using a mini dumb switch. This has not made any difference unfortunately.

[Sebastian Roth]

@mandrade Sad to hear that you couldn’t make it work this way either. I think the only suggestion I am left with is try build an iPXE binary and “Enable Debug” http,httpcore,httpconn. Please take a picture or video of what you see on screen then. Possibly we see exactly where it hangs along the way.

[mandrade]

@Sebastian-Roth ,

I built my own iPXE binary using the rom-o-matic.eu page and following the features that needed to be enabled on page https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/IPXE#rom-o-matic.eu

Now I see this:

Now it doesn’t even go as far, DHCP fails.

[george1421]

While I have personal reasons for asking you to test this, it would be interesting to see if we can get around the pxe issue with this specific hardware. I’ve been working on a PXE-less booting method for hardware that we can’t get to PXE boot into FOS. Here is the background in this post that describes what actions are needed. I’ll IM you the link. https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7767/another-init-xz-issue/22

https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7767/another-init-xz-issue/22

Understand this is not intended to distract you from getting iPXE working on this target computer, I’m interested to see if we can get the FOS engine to boot on this troubled hardware.

[mandrade]

@george1421 ,

sure will give this a try. where would I place the img file, I assume on a USB drive?

[george1421]

@mandrade Yes, the idea is to use either dd on linux or win32diskimager (on windows) to write the .img file to a usb flash drive (min 256MB). The image is only 128MB so if you write the image to a 64GB flash drive everything above 128MB will not be accessible. So choose wisely. This is the same files that are delivered over iPXE except I’m using grub to load bzImage and the inits from the USB instead if iPXE. This current grub file is setup to load the x64 kernel. That i7 should be a 64 bit processor, so the only change to the grub.cfg is to give it the ip address of your fog server.

[mandrade]

@george1421 ,

Thank you very much. Will give it a shot and will let you know how this went.

[mandrade]

@george1421 ,

So the feedback is a follows. If I use the mini dock and boot from the USB drive, no dice. After asking around here I was told we had some USB 2.0 Lenovo ethernet adapters.

I decided try it, plugged it in to one of the USB ports. I then booted off the USB drive, and I now am able to get an IP, eth0 continues to be a problem but that’s ok I now get an IP assigned on eth1.

I started off by trying to inventory the machine. That worked fine, machine inventory success. However if I then try to image, I get the following error:

Fatal error:: Unknown Request Type:: Null

Ideas??

[george1421]

@mandrade what version of fog do you have? The USB booting was added with r8050 of the trunk.

If you have that release or newer then schedule a capture or deploy what ever you want. And then boot via USB and pick capture/deploy. That will supply the missing type variable.

But this IS good news that you are able to register.

This method is not ideal because with pxe booting ipxe talks to fog so the settings are dynamic. And with USB they are static.

[mandrade]

@george1421 ,

Ah, right ok. I’m still on version 7965! Will update and try again.