iPXE over WiFi // 12-2018 Any Update?

[mcc85]

Hi,

My name is Michael. I was trying to research a way to boot a wireless laptop to a PXE WDS server.

Not just a single wireless laptop, any.

I'm not much of a unix guru and I know this iPXE program uses a fair bit of it to compile, but I fail to see how it works, despite glancing over the documentation.

Lets say that I happen to have a driver pack like 'Snappy Driver Installer' that holds a lot of generic WiFi drivers, and that if I were to make a thumb drive that loads an iPXE that detects what WiFi card is in a device and pulls that file from the driver pack...

How could I accomplish that?

I'm trying to avoid having to use a USB to Ethernet adapter, because the next step would be to try and get tablets and phones to work with other deployment methods... however there's not much documentation on people even trying to do this over WiFi except with SCCM. I'm not using a domain or active directory so that idea is no bueno.

Figured that in 12/2018 that somebody would've had something that could do all of this but perhaps the right initiative isn't there yet.

Google searching for this has been pretty limited.

- Michael

[NiKiZe]

Drivers are written to talk with a specific hardware, and each platform needs it's own way of writing those drivers to work.
It seems you are referring to windows drivers - and that can not be used - in any way - in an iPXE context.

And the same SCCM is not relevant.

Wifi in iPXE is not really cared for, one reason is that new devices requires large firmware blobs which would make it unusable.
And still you would need to boot that iPXE binary from a USB device anyway.

One thing that does work tho is to use Android or iPhone in USB thetering mode, and an iPXE build with the acm--ncm drivers.
A gotcha here tho is that it will be on a routed network, so you won't be able to control iPXE vi DHCP, but must go with embeded scripts for configuration.