Acer travelmate b usb to ethernet

[fox134]

Hello,

I’m fairly new to all of this. I have Ubuntu 16.04 with fog 1.5.0 that I recently installed. This is an isolated network, with fog giving the IPs. We recently ordered a batch Acer travelmate-B models with windows 10 and switched them to legacy boot. These don’t have the Ethernet jacks and I’ve got a usb to Ethernet to support the asix 88772 a/b driver. It detects the dongle and goes through the process like normal. At the ipxe stage, I get no configuration method and DHCP failed. Hit s for ipxe shell. Not sure what I’m missing here. Thanks in advance for the help.

[george1421]

Two things come to mind.

1. Does ipxe display the mac address of the wireless nic? If it does then move on to #2
2. Check to see if spanning tree is enabled on that network switch port. If it is either enable one of the fast STP protocols or place a unmanaged (dumb) switch between your building switch and the target computer as a test. If it boots into FOS then you do have a spanning tree (network) issue.

[fox134]

Yes, it does show the mac of the nic. Couldn’t get anything through the unmanaged switch either. So stp is the investigation point for these ethernet to usbs? I’m still experimenting with different options.

[george1421]

@fox134 well if its shows the mac address of the usb nic, that means that iPXE should have a driver for it. At the screen where it says press “s” for the iPXE console. Go ahead and do that before the timeout.

Then wait 30 seconds and key in the following to see if it picks up an IP address dhcp net0 or dhcp net1 if net0 doesn’t get an address because the usb network adapter is not the first one. If you do pick up an IP address after 30 seconds then I would surely explore what is going on with spanning tree.

[fox134]

@george1421

this is what im getting

[george1421]

@fox134 Right at the point of the IPXE> _ prompt key in dhcp net0 or dhcp net1 after 30 seconds to see if it picks up an IP address. (I see you did a dncp net0, btw).

Is that mac address listed the same mac address as on the usb adapter?

[fox134]

@george1421 I did the dhcp net0 with the same message. Yes, the mac matches the one listed. It’s strange because I’m so close but theres something that I’m missing.

[Sebastian Roth]

@fox134 What do you see running ifstat net0 in th ipxe shell?

[fox134]

@sebastian-roth

[george1421]

@fox134 So if you are at the screen where you entered ifstat, it would be interesting to know what would happen if you keyed in the following commands, of course localized to your network.

  set net0/ip 192.168.0.100
  set net0/netmask 255.255.255.0
  set net0/gateway 192.168.0.1

And then see if you can ping something on your local network

ping 192.168.0.51

The issue is here, that you had network connectivity to get this far. Why not now. It should be working, ifstat shows the link is up (has link connection) but nothing coming in from the switch.

[Sebastian Roth]

@fox134 FOG uses undionly.kpxe by default as it does work in most cases. Please try other iPXE binary like ipxe.pxe or realtek.kpxe. In fact try all *.pxe you find in /tftpboot on your FOG server.

[fox134]

@sebastian-roth Ok. Is there a certain command to explore these options besides /tftboot and changing the binary?

[fox134]

@sebastian-roth I can see the permissions folder for tftpboot but how can I change it to use ipxe.exe?

[george1421]

@fox134 Well lets hope you don’t have an ipxe.exe in there…

The client gets its booting information from (the) dhcp responsible for assigning an ip address to the target computer. So if you want the target computer to use a different boot file then you might update dhcp options 67.

Now with that said, from your OP you say that FOG is giving out the IP addresses on a dedicated imaging network. So if you want to change the boot file, you will need to edit the dhcp config file on your FOG server.

To see what you config file looks like, you can review this example: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=BIOS_and_UEFI_Co-Existence#Example_1

You will see for arch 7 and 9 it calls out ipxe.efi. You can replace that with maybe snponly.efi or any of the other efi files. Then you must restart your dns server. On ubuntu you would issue the command sudo systemctl restart isc-dhcp-server to restart the service.