Tales from the Datacenter

WDS and PXE

A post that I wrote in March for another blog:

We’ve been trying for a day or two to get Windows Deployment Services up and running over PXE to eliminate our need for boot disks to image with, but ran across some issues getting the client (in this case, an Optiplex 745) to boot via PXE. During my Google Marathon, I found the one and only article that was of any use to me:

“DHCP….” followed by “PXE-E53: No boot filename received”

SYMPTOM

When being started, the PXE client comes up with the PXE copyright message, then displays

DHCP….

After a while, the following error message is displayed:

PXE-E53: No boot filename received

Depending on the PXE client’s system setup boot device list configuration, the PC then either stops or tries to boot from the next boot device in the system setup boot device list.

CAUSE

The “PXE-E53″ error indicates that the PXE client received a reply to its DHCPDISCOVER message, but the “boot filename” information was missing in this reply.

RESOLUTION

Make sure that the “boot filename” option is present on your DHCP or BOOTP server, and that its value is set to the filename of the boot loader.

When using Microsoft DHCP server, add option 067 (Bootfile Name) to your scope. When using a Unix/Linux based (ISC) DHCP server, use the “filename” parameter for this purpose.

In the context of the BootManage Administrator, the boot loader filename is “pxboot” for PXE clients and “bpboot” for TCP/IP BOOT-PROM clients. So, if you have exclusively PXE clients, set the boot filename option to the value “pxboot”. If you have exclusively TCP/IP BOOT-PROM clients, set the boot filename option to the value “bpboot”. In a mixed PXE and TCP/IP BOOT-PROM client environment, you must configure your DHCP or BOOTP server so that it provides the PXE clients with the “pxboot” boot loader, and the TCP/IP BOOT-PROM clients with the “bpboot” boot loader.

As it says, the PXE client is receiving DHCP replies, but is unable to locate a useable boot file/image. Once I changed DHCP option 66 to my WDS server’s name and option 67 to “bootx86wdsnbp.com” (which is the WDS boot file that loads the PXE environment), the machine didn’t hesitate to boot.

It took about 15 minutes or so to image the machine from start to finish (all it was doing, though, was installing Vista – we would use custom images so the timing may change). This is about the time it takes with our current Ghost setup, but with WDS deployment points can be created. This would allow us to have a deployment server in each office and would streamline the way we share updates to images.

Credit: bootix.