Hi all,
I installed FOG 1.5.9 on 31 December 2021 from scratch on a ESXi VM hosting Ubuntu 18.04.6 server (following this tutorial: https://schulnetz.alp.dillingen.de/materialien/Fog.pdf ), and it worked brilliantly out of the box with most of the PCs in our school.
However, I had trouble booting a Fujitsu K5010/24 with a Realtek PCIe GbE NIC, type 8168 ( PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_125F1734&REV_15 in Windows device manager). The MAC address begins with 98:ee:cb which makes it a Wistron make. The manufacturer lists the card as a Realtek RTL8111H, same as for the Fujitsu A3510 which started this thread. The computer has no option for BIOS, only EFI. It would give me “Waiting for link-up on net0… ok” and then “Configuring (net0 98:ee:cb… … No configuration methods succeeded. (http://ipxe.org/040ee186)” – so, no dhcp.
snp.efi and snponly.efi said “Received DHCP answer on interface net0” but would then hang on loading bzImage, sometimes at 0% sometimes at 1% or 2%. No good.
After a (very!) long time of searching I found this thread and followed the instructions - before building iPXE, the kernel message was iPXE 1.20.1+ (g4bd0). The file /tftpboot/ipxe.efi was 958k (in WinSCP)
In my case (Ubuntu) the path to buildipxe.sh is
cd /home/fog/fogproject/utils/FOGiPXE/
Building took a few minutes, but it produced no error messages.
After building, the kernel message was iPXE 1.21.1+ (ge814d). The file /tftpboot/ipxe.efi is now 1042k (in WinSCP).
The new file worked perfectly with my test machines as well as the problematic Fujitsu K5010/24!
I am happy to share the ipxe.efi file in case anybody needs it on https://www.langer.ws/2022/01/fog-solve-client-boot-problems, and I want to express how grateful I am to all the people who developed this brilliant gem of an open-source project, and to all the contributors in the forum as well. Thanks, guys and gals, you are the salt of the earth!