@thezman007 I would say the pcap file you provided is a model of how a proxy dhcp and dhcp server should interact. The first part of the pcap is perfect.

The second part starting at second #19. The client issues a dhcp discover and the dnsmasq answers right away, the client had to issue a second discover request before the main dhcp server @ 2.2 address responded. This pattern is repeated at the end of the pcap (you can see this if you look at the pcap with wireshark).

So this is only me reading the tea leaves but I think there is something up with your main dhcp server because its being slow to respond to dhcp requests. Understand I only can see 25 second pcap but I find it abnormal. When things go sideways (and it probably will) get a pcap of the failure, that’s going to tell us what’s missing.

I’m going to remove your pcap from your post because its not needed now.

@george1421 said in PXE issues:

@Jamaal This problem is solvable but it make take some effort on your part.

Lets start with the basics.

For the DHCP IP zone where your pxe booting clients live, you need to set dhcp options 66 to the IP address of your fog server. And for dhcp options 67 that needs to be snponly.efi or snp.efi. With those settings configured on a MS Windows based dhcp server a pxe booting client should boot. Make sure on your dhcp server that is responding to bootp and dhcp requests. Its been a while since I messed with windows but on the dhcp server there should be a setting of dhcp bootp or both. Select both.

Now lets talk about WDS for a second. A WDS server can use dhcp options 66 and 67 as above, but it can also run a proxy dhcp service that tells the client to ignore the dhcp options and come talk to it for boot information after it gets an IP address for the dhcp server. This maybe called a netboot service or something like that on your WDS server. Its not part of the main WDS service. If this service is still enabled it will override any settings you make in dhcp for pxe booting.

So how do you figure this out to what’s wrong?

The easiest and most complicated issue is to identify what is flying down your network during the pxe booting process. You can do this with wireshark on a witness computer (computer not part of the pxe booting process). This witness computer can either be a ms windows or linux computer, the key is to have wireshark loaded. When you start up a capture use a capture filter of port 67 or port 68 or port 4011 That will limit what wireshark sees to only the dhcp packets. Make sure the witness computer is connected to the same subnet as the pxe booting computer.

Start the packet capture and then attempt to pxe boot the target computer. Continue to capture the packet until the pxe booting computer either reaches the fog iPXE menu or errors out. Then stop the capture.

In the top section you should see the DORA (discover, offer, request, and finally ack/nack) process. The process goes as follows:
Client -> Discovery
Server-> Offer
Client -> Request
Server -> Ack/Nack

In this process you are most interested in the one or more OFFER packets. In a normal network you should only see one OFFER packet. When WDS is involved you will see one OFFER packet from your main dhcp server and a second OFFER packet from your WDS server. If you are seeing the OFFER from your WDS server then you don’t have the proxy-dhcp service disabled, and that is causing your issue. If you are seeing two offer packets from two different dhcp servers, such as a primary / secondary setup make sure both dhcp server are configured to boot from FOG server.

Now what do you do if you only have one OFFER packet and its still not working. This is where you need to select the OFFER packet and then look at the data in the parameters box. There will be the bootp fields of next-server and boot-file these need to be configured for the fog server IP and snp.efi. Then in the dhcp options section options 66 and 67 need to be set correctly. If one or the other sections are not set correctly you will get random machines not booting while others are.

If you can’t figure it out save the packet capture file “be sure you only captured the dhcp process” and up load the file to a file share site and post the link here and one of us will take a look to see what’s wrong. But I think from what I covered here you should be able to figure out what the pxe booting client is being told to do incorrectly.

George,

I ran the idea with the system administrator at my job and of course he was doubtful (conceited), he turned off the server thinking that would solve the issue. I ended up looking at an older forum and made a USB with the ipce file and booted up the machines that were given me issues and that worked. You guys can close this and mark as resolved. Again, I appreciate your guidance on this.

@alexamore90 I think you’re asking for something like this? https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/9463/fog-postinit-scripts-before-the-magic-begins?_=1768874256297

@alperi The bit if detail you are missing is what the kernel parameters were that was sent to the fog client. From what you posted it appears that the FOG server has all of the bits in the right spots.

In the kernel parameters that are passed to bzImage during boot up it lists where the FOS engine can find the deployment server. I would verify the IP addresses are correct. If everything appears correct with the parameters, we can debug this a bit more by debug deploy and then manually interact with the fos engine from the target PC’s console.

Was not sure which ubuntu version of these (20.04, 22.04, or 24.04) was used as the basis for the FOG release v1.5.10.1734.

Thanks, @FOGBreaker101, for the version you are using.

Some software doesn’t use the latest released version of the OS distro, but often one major version back.

@Tom-Elliott Alrighty. So my FOG server at another location is acting up in the same fashion with the failure to check in.

Before we used it I updated to 1.60-beta.2265 to hopefully negate it but I did not drop the fog table from mysql before doing so.

Are there any logs you want me to pull?

@Tom-Elliott Sorry for the lack of clarity in my explanations and the use of screenshots unrelated to my problem.

I have upgrade to the last beta and deploy on registered host works well.
Thank you.

I’ll check if not registered host now appear in Pending Hosts.

Also occurring on Dell Latitude 5450 laptops.

@Tom-Elliott Thank you, Tom. The init version is now 2025xxx. I’ll test soon to confirm the SSD info is showing in logs.

@brent could you specify exactly at which point of the installation you see this error? If you notice the installer hangs or fails specifically during the “pinning” stage, it is likely a name resolution issue.

I’ve found a solution for this: you need to manually edit the Windows hosts file at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and add an entry with your FOG server’s IP address followed by the name “fogserver”. This ensures the SmartInstaller.exe recognizes the server and can download the certificate properly.

@CanadienITGuy Just for your and anyone’s fyi the autoexec.ipxe... Not Found is not an error. It’s more of an info message than a warning or error.
I actually have tested adding an autoexec.ipxe, even just an empty file to remove that message but even an empty file or a file that is even just a symlink or copy/paste of our normal ipxe/boot menu files causes things to break in the process.
The autoexec.ipxe is meant for adding customization to the ipxe process without needing to re-build the ipxe binary. But my testing with it within the fog workflow was that it’s best to just let that message exist and to see it as it being not found means the process will not be altered from your expected Fog ipxe workflow

@Kureebow I’ve had this happen to me before. These are the two cases that I’ve seen:

1 - I captured an image in UEFI and the computer that I was deploying it to was in Legacy mode. I also had the inverse of this, where I captured in Legacy and was trying to deploy to UEFI.
2 (the most common for me) - Some sort of RAID or volume management device is enabled in the UEFI. I only use HP so I don’t know what it would be called on Dell, but on HP there is an option that I have to disable “Configure Storage Controller for VMD”.

@Tom-Elliott I’m having this issue currently running Fog version 1.5.10.1593 and OS version 10.0.19044 Build 19044. I’ve tried all of these steps and a plethora of others but have been unable to successfully capture a final image. Do you have any other ideas to try?

@romprager The simple answer is depends on the iso image and what OS will boot from the ISO image.

I do have several how tos in the forum that shows how to net boot several different installers.

https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10944/using-fog-to-pxe-boot-into-your-favorite-installer-images

Hi Again guys

I have some news about this problem.
I found a work around.

I change the file d1.fixed_size_partitions deleting the recovery Windows partition. This change generated and error when I made the deploy image in Client PC.
But if I cancel the job in the CLI fog server and reset the client machine after fog show the error
It boot ok.

I’ll continue reading …
Thanks