surface Pro 4 FOS dhcp issues
-
Hello,
First of all thank you for the effort and work that has gone into making f.o.g. great.
Unfortunately we are having issues with our surface pro 4 devices.
Our Surface Pro 3 and Surface Pro (5) devices work just fine on the same server, network and usb nics.
We are able to use PXE boot to boot into the ipxe menu and then either select deploy image or register and then it is able to download the bzimage and the init.xz and then boots into the linux Kernel (fos) and then we receive an error: Failed to get an IP via DHCP! Tried on interface(s): (empty)
Please check your network setup and try again.
Press enter to continue.Depending on the exact kernel version (above is 4.11.6) we may also receive errors about the usb port that the nic uses.
It looks like the FOS linux kernel is unable to recognize the USB nics.
Wer are using the official Microsoft USB nics and they are known good as they work just fince with other surface pro models.
Please advise if i should be using a specific kernel version or if there is anything else i could try? If any further information is required I will be happy to provide more.
-
Ugh, surface pros… Just kidding. Well not really…
There was a recent thread that discussed this issue: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/11635/microsoft-surface-pro-4-using-dock-has-issues-with-dhcp-for-imaging-task
In a nut shell the issue is with the external dock and the current series of linux kernels. Both issues are outside of the FOG Project control.
So what can you do?
- Strong arm (force) Microsoft to release the design guide on their network adapters.
- Use a down level kernel just for the MS surface systems (4.10 should work??)
- Force the kernel developers to reverse engineer the surface nic drivers to make it work again.
- Use a supported third party USB NIC, and USB boot into iPXE bypassing uefi pxe booting on the surface devices.
Out of all of the options #4 has the least pain in the group.
-
@kyron said in surface Pro 4 FOS dhcp issues:
Wer are using the official Microsoft USB nics and they are known good a
Update:
with the kernel version 4.12.3 and the has_usb_nic=1 option i am able to load an image.
I think the issue was caused because the tablets that i had the issue with came back from the RMA process from microsoft and have an ancient firmware version with very poor performance (you can notice the lag when entering the bios password).
I did not previously have this problem with tablet that had windows running as they receive firmware updates through windows update and will have had a recent firmware version.
-
From my further testing i can confirm that kernel 4.12.3 works well on the current batch of Surface pro 4. Kernel 4.13.4 or higher just gives a black screen.
The most recent kernel (4.15.2) works well on the surface Pro 3 and the Surface Pro (5).
The odd thing is that until very recently the microsoft usb nic would boot just fine without the ‘has_usb_nic=1’ kernel parameter. From what i can tell it has arrived with an update of fog.
-
@kyron said in surface Pro 4 FOS dhcp issues:
Kernel 4.13.4 or higher just gives a black screen.
Can you please verify if the device is hanging or if it’s just the screen staying black. For that note down the client IP (DHCP log or something), boot it up into a job while you send ICMP ping messages from another computer. Keep your eyes on the ping to see if it stops responding at some point (“freeze”?) or if it keeps going (display just black).
-
This post is deleted!
