Posted in troubleshooting on Dec 8th, 2024
TIL a DHCPv4 server can respond with two different TFTP boot-file-names in a single DHCPOFFER packet. And how the second filename can get corrupted with extra junk that shows up as a PXE client trying to download a slightly wrong file from your TFTP server. TL;DR: Supermicro UEFI firmware has dodgy PXE TFTP implementation, combined […]
Posted in troubleshooting on Nov 17th, 2024
Years behind schedule I finally got around to replacing ISC DHCP with Kea DHCP so I could finally have proper IPv6 host reservations. What I just learned, and should have learned years ago, that several of my motherboards such as the Supermicro A1SAi and Intel NUC while they support UEFI PXE booting, they do not […]
Posted in troubleshooting on Oct 26th, 2024
Here’s one for the future troubleshooting seekers. I was testing IPv4 UEFI PXE booting a Supermicro A1SAi motherboard after applying the Atom 2550 fix and couldn’t get the thing to load the network bootstrap program (NBP). I’m not at all saying this is the only reason for hitting a PXE-E99 error, this is just what […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 18th, 2017
A/K/A Ubuntu for CentOS kickstart users I needed to install Ubuntu on a server so I finally got around to figuring out how to do an automated, unattended installation. Specifically, how to install Ubuntu on bare-metal over the network using an existing PXE setup in an all-CentOS environment, as you would in a datacenter. I […]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 30th, 2016
My colleague Matthew gave a presentation about bare metal provisioning servers at Facebook on IPv6-only networks at SREcon last month. He discusses the entire process from why we went v6-only, selection of DHCP server and network boot loaders, through installing CentOS on hosts, and all of the gotchas along the way. By audience survey it […]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 2nd, 2016
It turns out my SuperMicro A1SAI boards made a fucking liar out of me. I bitched and moaned it was 2016 and they didn’t support UEFI PXE booting despite supporting UEFI, but they do. I just didn’t know where to look. Under “PCIe/PCI/PNP Configuration” in boot setup, the “Launch Storage OpROM Policy” and “Launch Network OpROM […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 9th, 2016
If you have Mellanox ConnectX-3 or ConnectX-4 NICs in your servers, I discovered it’s possible to do IPv6 OS installations via PXE. FlexBoot is their on-board PXE implementation that ships on their NICs and it’s based on iPXE. It turns out that as of FlexBoot version 3.4.718 from January 2016 they’ve added beta IPv6 support. […]
