@george1421
New revelations have been made. As I said I now replicated the whole setup on a local isolated network (with exception of the apparmor modifications, not necessary on a bare-metal installation).

I have my witness-computer connected to both networks with 2 seperate NICs. Only one is active at a time. In both setups I first started wireshark on the witness computer and booted a notebook into pxe.

Main network: No packets or barely some DHCP-ACKs (that were not from the booting laptop). Isolated local network: Discover -> Offer -> Request -> ACK. Laptop got an IP from the router and loaded the appropriate bootrom from the fogserver and booted from it.

Conclusion: Since the witnessing of the DHCP-packets have nothing to do with fog itself it is safe to say that there is some sort of broadcoastfiltering of the DHCP-relevant ports. The (almost) exact same installation worked in an isolated network but not on the main network.

Thank you so much, I finally know the exact cause of the problem and am able to proceed. I now have to write up a request if the networking team would be so kind to allow the broadcoasting of those port-packets to a single static IP that I own (I really hope they’ll allow that. Now that I think of it this makes total sense. If people are able to plug in their own devices into the network that behave like a DHCP-Server and then handle the IPs before the main DHCP does you are in a golden MITM-position and can intercept with the network-packets to your desire). But as far as fog goes, this is nothing from its side.

So I think I can say this is solved for the cause of “troubleshooting”. Even if my journey is not exactly at its end yet. Thanks again!