@AlexisPHC If it magically stops working again, then I would check to see if you have two dhcp servers on your network. If it continues to work, then move on to the next issue. But in general I don’t like it when stuff just starts working, because the tides can shift the other direction with out notice too.

@DanCan Hi This is currently a known issue on some motherboards. Honestly not sure what is causing this to happen. I am working on a fix to this issue just haven’t had too much time lately.

@sega said in FOG Multicast on different VLANs:

Is there something that I can look up, to see where the problem is?

Well your router supporting PIM is a good sign. Some routers have a service called igmp proxy or igmp relay, or even igmp snooping (you will find this more on switches, but check). This service typically has a number of interfaces to listen on and then a master interface where your multicast source lives. Its job is to relay the multicast requests to the proper interface.

PIM has two modes sparse and dense, that may be just for switches, I don’t remember. Sparse mode only sends the multicast traffic to the subscriber’s port, where dense just blasts out the muticast to all ports. You want sparse mode if possible, that way only the ports with a multcast receiver will see the traffic and not flood your network.

@george1421 Thanks, George.

@Sebastian-Roth while poking round in the BIOS on some new Dell machines I did find an option called “Force PXE on next Boot” - https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-uk/dell-cmnd-config-v3.0/dell_command_configure_cli-v3/-forcepxeonnextboot?guid=guid-85c17652-4a18-4538-8665-e6b3e777d649&lang=en-us

You have to have the dell tools installed, but this would be a possible option.

I know with my current machines when a BIOS update happens it keeps overwriting the boot order so my PXE boot doesn’t happen. Quite annoying!

I don’t know how I’d go about making the FOG Client execute this command before a task reboot though.

@Tom-Elliott ah, that would work! Sorry, the documentation is such a mish-mash that it’s hard to find answers for some of this stuff!

@christop Also, another output for informatoin would be:

sudo systemctl -l status FOGMulticastManager.servcie

@Tom-Elliott to note, this has been happening on all our Lenovo L14s laptops (with no LAN ports), tested with 3 different Lenovo USB-C LAN Adaptors

When booting back up, it brings the Blue screen error:

‘Recovery
Your PC couldn’t start properly
After multiple tries, the operating system on your PC failed to start, so it needs to be repaired.
Error code: 0xc0000001
You’ll need to use recovery tools. If you don’t have any installation media (like a disc or USB device), contact your PC administrator or PC/Device manufacturer.
Press Enter to try again
Press F1 to enter Recovery Environment
Press F8 for Startup Settings
Press Esc for UEFI Firmware Settings’

As John mentioned, we used the same LAN adaptor previously and managed to image via FOG successfully before.

i even tried changing the mac address to the default internal laptop mac address after the initial fog image completed (when it shutdowns the laptop) and booted the laptop back up to see if it helps but no luck

@george1421 said in Broken iPXE boot loader:

@Mightmar I wonder if the devs for iPXE has changed something in the ipxe source code to cause this error message about autoexec.ipxe not found. This should be supplied by the fog project add on files. I’ll take a look at the compiler to see if something has changed. You should not see this error.

Reinstalling 1.5.10 will fix the error of the latest build of iPXE. Also you mentioned about a later version of FOG. Yes you can install that over 1.5.10 without issue. It should also have updated (but not the newest version of iPXE).

This is the first post I found searching autoexec.ipxe so replying here for future searchers.

This was an addition in a recent ipxe version, and is meant to be a way to add ipxe based functionality without needing to recompile ipxe in order to edit an embedded script (https://github.com/ipxe/ipxe/discussions/1237#discussioncomment-9847219), I can’t find the post/doc again but I remember reading in one place that ipxe added it as part of the hopes of getting a signed ipxe shim so users could use the signed shim and then use this script to add what they can’t embed. While technically we can create a blank file in /tftpboot/ i.e. just

#!ipxe

which will remove the error during boot, this can then cause kernel panics when loading into FOS. Why it does this is a bit of a mystery at the moment, maybe it’s adding to or replacing another part of our pxe menu scripts that causes something in loading the kernels to lose access to ramdisk drivers. But adding it can break everything, so for the time being, just ignore the error.

@AngryITGuy First let me say I don’t use FOG for image deployment any more since I’ve moved to a different IT group, but if this situation hit my desk I would go through a similar process as below

I have more questions than answers for you. But the good thing here is FOG is imaging these systems and can deploy windows 10 to the hardware without issue. Right away we can rule out fog’s foundational support system being broken because it can deploy win10 and win11 to other hardware and win10 to this stone hardware.

When I debug something new or strange I try to build a truth table in my head of different experiments to see what works and what not works. Something like:

Deploy and boot win10 Dell laptop: Yes
Deploy and boot win11 Dell laptop: Yes
Deploy and boot win10 Stone laptop: Yes
Deploy and boot win11 Stone laptop: No (kind of)

So now to the unknown questions (and I assume these stone laptops are in uefi mode, you mentioned ‘bios’, but your boot loader is ipxe.efi.

On this stone laptops do you have pxe setup as the default boot source or is it the hard drive? This question is to see if the boot is failing if you are booting through ipxe.efi or if the firmware is having a problem finding the boot partition. If you are booting through iPXE see if changing the boot order to the hard drive solves the issue (for this test).

You will need to turn off secure boot for this next step. If you swap the hard drives between the dell and stone computer, does the stone computer boot normally repeated times? Does the dell computer reboot repeated times OK? This check is to see if the problem moves with the hard drive. The question is around if fog combined with the disk controller hardware on the stone doing something to damage the boot sector for win11 when it deploys. The dells works, can you get the stone computers working by deploying to a dell and then transplanting the hard drive to the stone?

If you deploy win10 and then upgrade to win11 on a stone laptop (verify its working 100%) and then capture and deploy to a same make and model computer. Does it boot correctly on the second computer? Can you deploy it to the same computer it was captured from and does it work? This will test if there is something wrong with your win11 image you are trying to deploy to the stone computer.

Lets see how the above goes before we plot the next test.

Just to recap

Test booting through iPXE vs firmware booting directly to hard drive Swap the hard drives between the dells and stone computers see if the problem moves Try to capture and deploy using the same hardware. First to like computer if no work, try to deploy to same computer image was captured from.

@Tom-Elliott Yes, everything is working as expected. For the longest time, FOG would always show UTC time for when an image was captured or deployed, now it is correctly showing local time and no more zombie processes! Thanks

@RAThomas I wont make you do a PR. I already pushed it if you wanted to use the the pushed code. 🙂 thanks for testing and letting us all know!

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation of the problem and for adjusting the code.
I’m not on the dev branch yet, but I’ll make sure to switch and use debug mode to trace the function.
It’s likely that the tip about using the serial number as the Primary Host Disk will need to be incorporated into my process.

At the moment, I have a large number of Windows 11 reinstallations to handle due to the end of support, so it will probably be a few weeks before I have time for this.
I’ll post an update in this thread once I get to it.

@george1421 I would need help with where I can edit and which files to add a script for quick inventory.