pxe interview questions
Top pxe frequently asked interview questions
I would like to set up a portable PXE server for diagnostic purposes. The issue is that I won't always have access to the DHCP server, or the router itself (sometimes a home router) doesn't have an easily accessible place to set the servername/file for broadcast.
I know that Trinity Rescue Kit is able to broadcast its PXE server without its own DHCP server. Can anyone point me in the direction to set this up on my own (without Trinity)?
Thanks.
Source: (StackOverflow)
NOTE: I wrote this as I had problems with the PXE/Network installation, but I managed to solve it as I was writing it. This is more of a helper guide if someone else has the same problem. Also, I don't have enough reputation to post more than two links, so when I'm refering to Link x, it can be found here: http://pastebin.com/kGGLGXQz
I've recently bought my student/business PC, which is a HP ProBook 650. I would like to format my drive and install a fresh installation of Windows 7 Professional. This is what I've tried so far:
CD-ROM -> There is none
SD-Card -> Can't select boot from this device
USB -> Can't select boot from this device
PXE/Network-> Having some trouble with TFTP amongst other problems.
CD-ROM: There is no CD-ROM on this laptop, and I don't have a external drive either.
USB & SD: I've tried to copy files from CD directly. I've tried using the list disk command-line approach. I've tried Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. When looking in BIOS, I checked that USB Port was active, and that it was listed under boot settings as an enabled option. When opening BOOT Menu, I only see "Internal Harddrive" & "Network". I didn't find anything in the BIOS that caught my attention.
PXE/NETWORK: I followed this guide: (Link 1) On how to setup a server on another machine to be installed on my laptop. I'm using my desktop computer to set everything up. I've installed Serva, followed every instruction, and everything went exactly as the guide was written. (Although I was a little unsure about the download network drivers for client computer, but I think i found the right one).
At first I tried to connect wirelessly through LAN. When pressing esc on the laptop at startup, it will enter a pre-bios-menu, and if I press f12, it will try to do a network boot. When network boot is entered initializing network link is displayed on the screen, and 5 seconds later, it reports that no network was found. In the Serva guide (linked above), I also had the option to install via. network cable. I changed the settings accordingly and and tried again. This time it was given a MAC adress, but TFTP timed-out. Img(Link 2) TFTP Settings(Link 3). DHCP Settings(Link 4).
Source: (StackOverflow)
In cooperation with my IT teacher we want to boot all PC's in IT class with Lubuntu. I've successfully set up PXE server, but there is one thing that worries us. Harddrives shouldn't be accessible from booted Lubuntu(normal user only). Would adding to fstab something like:
/dev/sda1 /Idk/What auto noauto
work? I'd like to add that I can uncompress squashfs livecd filesystem. If no, what other solution is there, to block auto-mounting /dev/sda drive?
Source: (StackOverflow)
Good afternoon, trying to set up Ubuntu 16.04 LTS installation with PXE-Server using a response file.
Installation is successful, but the problem is that after setting up, there are no network interfaces in the system. How can this be fixed?
I have a suspicion that it was necessary to make some magic with the help of kill-all-dhcp; netcfg, but I can not find any sensible information on how to use it.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I have a Linux laptop running a PXE server. I run the PXE server on the wired port so I can connect computers to it directly. When the Ethernet port is connected I can use PXE to boot a VirtualBox machine using a bridged network. (Bridged to wired of course.)
When there is a cable connected to the Ethernet port, everything works just fine. But I'd like to be able to test the PXE server when I reconfigure it without connecting something to the Ethernet port.
When the virtual machine tries to get an IP address I see that there is a DHCP discover received and a DHCP offer is send, but the DHCP request and acknowledge never occur. As I said before, it works flawless when a cable is connected.
I have considered using a loopback connector, but I'm not sure that this will work and don't see this as a real solution. Maybe something like a TUN/TAP interface will do the trick?
Source: (StackOverflow)
I'm doing a PXE installation.
I success to do it but I have a final problem and I don't know where to search to find this answer.
After my installation I would like to switch from my network bios boot to a hard drive bios boot.
If I don't do that, there is an infinite loop.
I know it's possible because it's exactly what happens after an installation from a usb stick.
I'm installing Debian 7 from an Ubuntu Server.
Does anyone have an idea to achieve this PXE installation?
Thank you in advance.
Source: (StackOverflow)
Would like to make a "massive" DOS floppy disk image, say 10MegaBytes or more containing all the firmware updates i need for any system, harddrive, BIOS. i do not need the DOS image to be networkable as everything will be on the PXE booted image, but networking would be nice. Since ZipDisks were attached to the floppy disk controller and were over 100MegaBytes, this should be possible. i tried a long time ago to do this and spent too much time on it only to have it fail to boot. So if someone has reliable instructions on how to create such a nightmarish beast and edit it, please let me know. One image that can used for PXE and copied to a USB stick would be a plus.
Too bad manufacturers don't supply a single bootable Linux ISO containing all their firmware updates, that would be easy to boot over-the-lan and have networking. HP servers do this and it is awesome.
Source: (StackOverflow)
Please explain the error in this screenshot:
DHCP Setting:
This screenshot was taken after powering off the old comp hence the server interface is shown as the wireless card - it becomes 192.168.0.1 when I connect wires and power up the old laptop to boot via PXE.
My scenario is simple. An old laptop and a new laptop . A cross over cable ( that I myself made from CAT 6 cable by cutting it and connecting 4 wires as mentioned in some doc).
The new laptop ( tftp server ) has a Wirelss Card ( with which I am browsing and writing this ) . And the cable is connected between laptops .
TFTP server ( new laptop details )
Windows IP Configuration
Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::f511:3d4a:ca01:122e%16
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.2
Wireless LAN adapter Wireless Network Connection:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Achilles
Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::99b1:8ae0:9e6c:f300%11
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.3
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.1
Source: (StackOverflow)
I am completely lost here. I'm trying to install linux onto a very old laptop that has no CD drive and won't boot from USB. My only option is a network (PXE) boot. Except... I have no idea how to setup the required tftp server. I tried using tftpd32 on Windows; the laptop seems to connect but then it says
PXE-E53 No boot file name received.
And then reboots. I have the required files in the tftpd folder and I have the boot file name in correctly, but it doesn't seem to be working. Is there another way I can do a network boot? Different program? Anything?
I've googled a million different tftp tutorials and they all use tftpd32 and all of them make no sense to me.
Source: (StackOverflow)
Is it possible to view the contents of a remote PXE/TFTP Server on a Windows PC? I would like to get the pxelinux.0 file off of a remote server, but when I connect using WinSCP or just Explorer I get prompted for credentials. When an user PXE boots they don't get prompted for credentials... How does this work?
Update:
ALBUM: http://imgur.com/a/eWOXc/all
I checked the DHCP server once again, our scope is currently: PICTURE 2 OF ALBUM
As you can clearly see the Boot Server Host Name is :10.26.30.15.
Pinging the host has a positive result: PICTURE 3 OF ALBUM
However a port-scan doesn't have a positive result (TFTP and PXE ports are not open): PICTURE 4 OF ALBUM
And when I try to use TFTPD32 or something I just get this: PICTURE 1 OF ALBUM
No success still...
Source: (StackOverflow)
Is it possible to boot compressed kernels with a compressed initrd with PXELinux?
First, a little background:
We created a custom Linux distro, for diskless OpenCL computing nodes. We want those nodes to fetch their OS from the network. Our Distro is composed out of a kernel (duh) and a large initrd which is loaded into RAM and everything is executed from there.
We chose to run everything off the initrd for two reasons:
- NFS was not an option to serve the filesystem's extra contents
- Fast file access from RAM.
- No persistent storage needed, data and config is pulled dynamically through a SOAP service.
Now our initrd is about 450M in size. At our network speeds, it takes about two to three minutes to load a single client. Will compression speed up te downloading, and if yes, which one should be used? Is LZMA supported by PXELinux, or do we need to stick to bzip2 or gzip?
Because of the 2-3 minutes loading time, booting 15 nodes over the same network link takes quite a lot of time. We decided not to use hard drives or CD/DVD drives, for financial reasons (cheapest HDD @ €30 times 15 is a lot of money saved ;-) )
So, our question is: what compression options are available for this setup? And how do we do this?
Thank you for your time!
Yvan Janssens
Source: (StackOverflow)
I setup a PXE Server and use it to serve some tools and live systems over the network (Setup with Debian Wheezy, tftpd-hpa, isc-dhcpd and nfs-kernel-server) and would like to deploy Windows Installations Images (created with WAIK + Autounattend.xml) over this PXE Server.
As far as I read I do need a WinPE to kick the installation off, which requires interaction.
Is there a way to boot and start the image directly or to start WinPE and the installation automaticly?
WinPE over PXE is no problem.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I have a FOG server installed on my Ubuntu 12.4 OS. The FOG server is setup and running. On the client machine, I am trying to network boot into my FOG server, but it never connects. I can't figure out which PXE ROM option that I should use either, UEFI or Legacy.
Source: (StackOverflow)
How do I get to the Thinkpad T530 BIOS setup? As the laptop turns on I press ENTER when prompted, then press F1 when prompted, but that takes me to the Intel PXE prompt. If I hit CTRL-S I get into the PXE setup menu, but when I exit that (or if I never hit CTRL-S in the first place) the computer just sits there and never gets into BIOS setup (and never boots, for that matter).
I know I can get into the BIOS because I did get into it once (only looked around, didn't change anything and definitely did NOT put it into UEFI-only mode). But I don't know/can't remember how to get past the PXE thing. Personally, I'd love to just disable it because I am never going to and don't even want to do remote network boots.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I'm having an issue getting VirtualBox to boot from the network. I have a Server 2k8 installed and setup and acting as AD DS, DNS, DHCP and WDS. I have two adapter on the server, one of which I have setup as a static IP the one I'm using to hand out IPs to some of the other guest VMs and its setup as a 192.168.2 address.
I have a couple guest VMs that I'm not sure if I'm setting up the adapters on them right or not. The static IP adapter on the server is adapter #2 and it's set to bridge, Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop and is set to Allow All. Now on some of the guests I have those adapters setup the same but when I try to boot from LAN it either gives me a No boot medium found. System Halted! message or it will get a 192.168.1 address.
I have a clonezilla.iso attached to the guest VMs and when I choose to Network Boot from iPXE from the list of options it presents it finds the 192.168.2 server and I'm able to press F12 and my Windows 7 image will load up and I'm able to install it. On the guest VMs I've tried setting the adapters to PCnet II and PCnet III and it will show the DHCP server IP and the guest IP and they're getting a 192.168.2 address but then it says No file found and sticks on the No bootable medium found. System halted!
Could someone help me out and see where I might be messing up?
Source: (StackOverflow)