Problem with DHCP/PXE boot using FOG
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Hi everyone, we recently moved to pfSense, and we have set up our FOG imaging server with it, and typically it works perfectly, even better than before, but we have noticed with a few oddities with specific PC's where PXE booting will not work. We have multiple VLANs and enabled network booting on each one of them, all with the same settings as shown -
Network Boot Enabled
Next Server - IP address of the FOG server
Default BIOS file name - undionly.kpxe
UEFI 32 bit file name - i386/ipxe.efi
UEFI 64 bit file name - ipxe.efiThis has worked perfect for pretty much everything we have thrown at it, BIOS or UEFI, but are finding a few outliers that connect to the PXE server, download the boot file, but then just continue the normal boot sequence after seeing "NBP file downloaded successfully".
Today we fired up wireshark to see what was going on, and found that, despite the vendor class clearly showing as a EFI 64 bit machine, it was being sent the undionly.kpxe file - which explains why it just skipped on through the boot process.
Now - all of this was while we were using a different VLAN, lets call it VLAN2 - so today I tried the same machine but on VLAN 1 - it worked immediately, exactly like all the others that worked previously. So I thought I would try something -
Changed Default BIOS file name on VLAN 2 to match UEFI, so ipxe.efi, and put it back on a VLAN2 - no change, still did not work. So I went to VLAN 1 and changed Default BIOS file name again as before - with the computer on VLAN2 still - and this time, it worked! So I guess you dont neccessarily need the bios file names on the other VLANs, just network booting enabled and pointing to the right place, so I removed the boot file names from the other VLANS.
I put back VLAN 1 to as it was before, otherwise many of our machines will have trouble booting, and of course, it was back to the way it was. It seems as if being on a different VLAN causes it to to not correctly identify which boot file to send this particular machine (and a few others). The strange thing is it works fine for many other UEFI and BIOS machines, so I'm pretty confused about what is happening.
Sorry for the wall of text, and apologies if I have not provided enough information (1st post!). Any help would be greatly appreciated!
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It seems DHCP/PXE implemention is somehow broken in current v 2.6.0. In my setup there is no any VLAN, but EFI machines are requesting "BIOS" boot file from TFTP server. I think it worked normally in some previous version.