Sanity check regarding using FOG with a Windows DHCP server.
-
First off, I absolutely love FOG, it’s brilliant work.
I have a bit of an odd environment, and have encountered problems with my planned deployment, so I’m hoping that someone can tell me if what I’m trying is even possible.
We’ve got a large deployment of Dell desktops, and are using Microsoft DHCP server (currently on 2012R2). For the majority of desktops, I want to have a WDS server configured to act as the imaging source.
However, there’s a lab of 50 machines on which I want to image Ubuntu.
My plan was to set up a FOG server, and then set the DHCP options for the machines in the computer lab to specifically use the FOG server.
I can get it to work with legacy boot, but I cannot get it to work with UEFI - and all our systems need to be UEFI booting. When I try, it sits on “start PXE over ipv4” for a while, then quickly flashes up "station address is <correct IP>, and then very briefly (I had to use slomo video on my phone to record) flashes up ‘Downloading NBP file… succeed to download NBP file’ - and then it lands in the standard dell boot error prompt.
I’ve tried using different boot files with no success.
Is what I’m trying reasonable, or am I setting myself up for failure?
Many thanks!
-
@gooses ok a couple of things here.
WDS uses proxydhcp requests. The is only relevent if your wds server is sending this boot information to your fog environment. This would be managed by your dhcp-helper service on your subnet router. If you are pxe booting into FOG OK then you can ignore this bit, I’m only posting it because I have seen conflicts with wds/sccm/fog in the same environment. This is because proxydhcp overrides dhcp option 66 and 67.
Now to pxe boot bios based computers you would setup dhcp option 67 to be undionly.kpxe. For uefi systems you would setup dhcp option 67 to be ipxe.efi or snponly.efi. You can not boot a bios based computer with a uefi boot loader, the same is true for booting a uefi based computer with a bios boot loader (which i’m guessing is the root of your issue).
The FOG Project also has a wiki page that describes how to configure a windows 2012 or later dhcp server to support dynamic pxe booting of both uefi and bios based computers. https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/BIOS_and_UEFI_Co-Existence#Using_Windows_Server_2012_.28R1_and_later.29_DHCP_Policy
The other option is to install dnsmasq on your fog server and let the fog server send out pxe boot info (only) on your imaging network. In this role your main dhcp server still issues IP addresses, just the pxe boot info comes from the fog server: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/12796/installing-dnsmasq-on-your-fog-server One possible use case for dnsmasq is if you have a dhcp server that can’t be modified or one that doesn’t support dhcp dynamic pxe booting.
