PXE-E53: No Boot File Received

[jamcdonald120]

Last year I installed fog branch on Ubuntu 16, (see https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/9093/imaging-dual-boot-on-m-2-ssd) I got it working successfully, but then, for a variety of reasons, we had to move the server computer, so I pulled the drive out of it and stuck it in a different computer, and moved the images to a different drive mounted as /images, at that point, fog stopped working for multi cast, and I don’t know why deploy still worked. now, for various reasons, the computer holding the drive needed to be imaged, so I moved the drive back to the original hardware, and now it does not deploy am image, instead when network boot starts (I have to launch network boot manually), it throws the error ‘PXE-E53: No Boot File Received’ and then continues to boot to GRUB. What is causing this and how do I fix it?

[Sebastian Roth]

@jamcdonald120 Did you setup PXE boot (DHCP server) on your own or just used the DHCP server within FOG?

[jamcdonald120]

I don’t remember, /opt/fog has ‘dodhce=“y”’ and ‘bldhcp=“1”’ if that helps

[Raymond Bell]

@jamcdonald120 Have you got your own DHCP server on the network? Because from what you sent

/opt/fog has ‘dodhce=“y”’ and ‘bldhcp=“1”

This is showing that the fog server is handing out dhcp and not you actual DHCP server

[Sebastian Roth]

@jamcdonald120 Well if FOG server is serving DHCP and TFTP you might want to check if those services are running:

ps ax | grep tftp
ps ax | grep dhcp

[jamcdonald120]

there may be another DHCP server on the network, I don’t know, basically I have a room of 26 computers (one of which is the fog server) that I control all networked through a switch that I don’t control, that I dont know for sure, but I think that switch is running a DHCP server

[Sebastian Roth]

Well, you cannot really use FOG without knowing at least a little bit about DHCP and PXE and how this stuff is setup within your network. We won’t be able to help you as we don’t have any information.

[jamcdonald120]

@Sebastian-Roth both are running, I have previously been able to use this install to image on this network, and I dont think it has changed since then

[Sebastian Roth]

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

[Raymond Bell]

@jamcdonald120 You have to add setting to the DHCP server to get fog to work… If you do not have access to this then you will not be able to use fog like Sebastian said. Look at the link he just posted.
If you do have access to the dhcp server then we might be able to help you out.

[Quazz]

@Raymond-Bell If he does not have access to DHCP server, he could actually use dnsmasq DHCP proxy for handing out boot files.

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

[Raymond Bell]

@Quazz True forgot about that.

[jamcdonald120]

if we assume that the DHCP setting of the router are correct (they worked before) is there anything else that could cause the problem?

[jamcdonald120]

@Sebastian-Roth I am able to run the tftp -v x.x.x.x -m binary -c get undionly.kpxe command from the machine I am trying to image, it worked. but pxe still reports no boot file recieved

[Sebastian Roth]

@jamcdonald120 said:

if we assume that the DHCP setting of the router are correct (they worked before) …

I am sure I have heard phrases like this more than a hundred times and it quite often turns out …

Asking the web to see what other things could cause this issue I see that the error message you posted is not quite the same most other people report - which is: PXE-E53: No boot Filename received (see the difference between ‘File’ and ‘Filename’?). Your positive test of trying to load the undionly.kpxe (how do you know your server is using this file and not ipxe.kpxe which we also use sometimes?) binary file makes me believe that your TFTP and the files on it are fine. This would emphasize even more that something is wrong with the DHCP! The message essentially says: “I got an answer from a DHCP server but no information on what file to load for PXE booting”.

You need to understand that DHCP is always a bit of an issue. This is because even if neither you nor any colleague changed the “original” DHCP server you can still run into problems if someone added another DHCP server answering requests in your network.

Please try this: Make one of your clients ready for turn on and PXE boot. Install and run tcpdump - a tool to capture network traffic - on your FOG server.

sudo -i
apt-get install tcpdump
tcpdump -w /tmp/dhcp_traffic.pcap port 67 or port 68 or port 69 or port 4111

Leave that command as is and start up the client till you see the error message on screen. Then stop the tcpdump command (Ctrl-c) and upload that packet dump file (/tmp/dhcp_traffic.pcap) from your server to the forum here.