IPXE and WDS

[Mangosniper]

Hello,

since I am not getting any response in the Citrix forum I wanted to ask here too.

I have quite some problems with booting over PXE on my VM hosted on an XenServer 7.2 (all updates installed). From the screenshot shown here I saw that IPXE is used.



To notice: If I boot from a VMWare VM from the same WDS with the same configuration, it works flawlessly.

During the boot I get all Information about the PXE Server via DHCP which works fine but when I start to boot the Image via "chain \boot\x64\pxeboot.n12" I get "TFTP download failed. Press any key to reboot".

I tried with a WDS running on Windows 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2016, same behaviour. I already configured WDS as shown in http://ipxe.org/appnote/chainload_wds.

I tested the TFTP Server functionality with the tftp-client pumpkin and was able to download the pxeboot.n12 succesfully. In the logs of the WDS are entrys which say that the tftp download from my VM actually worked regardless the error message the VM shows.

Any suggestions? If any more information is needed feel free to ask.

KR,

Niklas

[NiKiZe]

Start with testing the latest version of ipxe, simplest case is to ctrl-b then type dhcp followed by chain http://boot.ipxe.org/ipxe.pxe

You should just let it autoboot from the normal WDS server (make sure you don't have any specific iPXE configuration in place)

The message you get must be from the windows parts itself.
Since logging of the WDS TFTP server don't give much useful information I would resort to using packet capture, such as with wireshark on the server to grab what is actually happening, both DHCP and TFTP packets are of interest (make sure to also include proxydhcp packets). And then maybe compare that to a case where it does work.

iPXE uses reconstructed DHCP packets which might be the reason that WDS don't get the information it needs.

This information might not get you all the way to the goal, but at least it should get you part of the way.

[Mangosniper]

Thanks for the answer. Unfortunately I was ill till today but I will start testing your ideas this week.