iPXE setup in mixed environment

[Peterbk]

Digging around for some days now I wasn't able to find a comprehensive setup for what I think is a quite common scenario.

We are in a mixed environment with linux, windows 7 and windows 10.
Hardware is from different vendors like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Raspberry, ..
The DHCP server is a M$ server 2012 provided by our network team.
The PXE boot server currently is a linux machine.
We use syslinux with cmenu with TFTP to boot different install or recovery images (like gparted) and use Ramdisk to install windows from ISOs.

The problem is that new hardware uses EFI boot and I couldn't get syslinux to work with those.
So I found iPXE as a possible alternative.
Alas I cannot find a good tutorial which describes how to migrate our setup to iPXE.
Can someone possibly point me in the right direction?

[jander]

I am doing this right now as we speak. It works, but you are correct, there is no central document or walk through.

First things First, you need an MDT server. This is key for Windows
https://deploymentresearch.com/Research/...-using-MDT

From there you can create unattended and even 0 Touch Windows installs.

Then you need an Ubuntu server.

Here are my notes / walk through so far. I intend on making this a complete guide, but for now it should be considered a rough draft....



apt install apache2
1. apt-get install tftpd-hpa
2. var/lib/tftpboot# mkdir efi64
3. https://rom-o-matic.eu/
a. Use the simple wizard
b. Choose efi snp only
c. Make sure the IP here reflects your Apache Server IP


4. Copy the file efi.snp to /var/lib/tftpboot
5. apt install apache2
6. Change Apache 000-default.conf in /etc/apache2/conf to bring the default root out of HTML and into WWW
7. Mkdir /var/www/ipxe
8. Create an ‘install.ipxe’ file in the ipxe dirctroy
9. Set your DHCP settings properly
10. Disable Secure Boot in the BIOS settings of your PXE Boot Computer
11. Create Clonzilla Directory
a. Copy from a Clonzilla Live CD
i. Initrd.img
ii. Vmlinuz
iii. Filesystem.squashfs
b. Add the following lines to your install.ipxe script

12. Create WINPE directory
13. Download WIMBOOT-latest.zip
14. Copy to /var/www/ipxe
15. Make directories boot and sources under /var/www/ipxe/winpe
16. Copy the ISO from MDT: D:\DeploymentShares\CorpProd\Boot
17. Mount the ISO
18. From \boot copy BCD and boot.sdi , from sources boot.wim to the proper folders on the server
19. Install NFS
20. sudo apt install nfs-kernel-server
21. mkdri /nfs_exports
22. create 2 sub directories Backups And images
23. Create 2x entires in /etc/exports to reflect on the new Mounts
24. Restart NFS sudo systemctl start nfs-kernel-server.service
25.