Problems booting/installing Win 10 from 2016 WDS using iPXE

[ramseyrt]

Hello,

I'm been having trouble PXE booting/installing Windows 10 images inside of RHEL 7.4 KVM VMs. After going through an exhaustive trouble-shooting process, I believe I've found a compatibility issue between RHEL's KVM VM boot loader, iPXE v1.0.0+, and my Server 2016 WDS system.

The breakthrough in my testing involved attempting to PXE boot/install to a bare metal system (which normally works just fine) using the iPXE boot disk (http://ipxe.org/download), the boot fails in the exact same way as it does within the RHEL KVM VM environment.

To get my iPXE 1.0.0+ systems to boot/install from the WDS server, I have to type in:

iPXE> chain tftp://172.16.0.1/boot\\x86\\wdsnbp.com

Does anyone know if there's a compatibility issue between iPXE v1.0.0+ and WDS? Does anyone know of a workaround for this issue? I'd prefer to be able to boot iPXE 1.0.0+ systems without any user intervention.

Thanks!

Rob
Niceville, FL

[NiKiZe]

1.0.0+ of iPXE does not say much at all, you should have parentheses after that that tells which git commit it was built from.
Version isn't really important right now, but might be later.

The best way is not to use broken WDS, but I understand if you don't like that answer ;D
I think there is some information on the forum about similar issues.
But what you could test is to run wireshark on your DHCP server (WDS) and grab all relevant traffic on UDP port 67,68,69,4011
Then run bare metal boot and get make sure that works, and then you run iPXE on the same machine.
Now it comes down to comparing the DHCP packets that the WDS server sends out, and if there is any difference between the 2 boots, then check the request.

One crucial piece of information is what actually does happen in the case where iPXE starts, nothing at all, or any message, reboot, etc?

[NiKiZe]

You seem to have posted to the mailing list as well with a solution:
http://lists.ipxe.org/pipermail/ipxe-dev...06388.html

And yes having "C:\" in the filename of the TFTP path is not a supported configuration.
It might work in "stupid" PXE implementations, but it is not possible to support in iPXE since it needs to support multiple protocols.
And I would in any way say that it is bug (read security issue) in the TFTP server implementation to accept that kind of path.

Who did the c:\ configuration in the first place?