FOG – solve client boot problems

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This article deals with FOG – Free Open Ghost, an open-source computer cloning system.

I had trouble with FOG network 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 here in case anybody needs it, 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! 😊