TFTP/PXE Booting question.

[epdavidson]

I have been trying for a week to PXE boot WindowsPE from a TFTP share on my Freenas box with little luck. I'm running Freenas 9.2.0 Release x64 (ab098f4). The DHCP is handled by my pfSense router and seems to be working fine. I can read the pxeboot.com file from the tftp folder just fine. The problem is the dreaded boot\bcd 0xc000000f error or whatever. I have rebuilt the BCD dozens of times straight from Microsoft walkthroughs and many other sources and am confident it is ok. My questions are: Is there still a 32MB file size limit for TFTP in Freenas? And, do I need to remap the backslash(\) to a forward slash (/) for the files in the \boot\bcd to be read? If so, how do I go about that? Yes, I have heard of Google, and have searched hundreds of pages, but none really addresses these issues in the FreeNAS setting. I've found several YT videos that help, but none that show PXE\TFTP booting of WinPE setup on FreeNAS. I want to use my FreeNAS box and not a separate or virtual TFTP server on another Linux\Windows box. This should be able to work, I feel I'm missing some simple step. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you.

eric

 

[dlavigne]

Is there still a 32MB file size limit for TFTP in Freenas?

Regarding this bit: Note: in versions of FreeNAS® prior to 8.3.0, TFTP is limited to a maximum file size of 32MB.

Any errors in /var/log/messages on the FreeNAS side?

 

[epdavidson]

So there is not a 32MB max file size, that is good to know. I will check the log and report what I find. Thank you very much for your response!
eric

 

[epdavidson]

I checked the /var/log/messages file and didn't find anything even related to tftp stuff. Is there another log I should be looking at? Sorry I'm so Linux illiterate.

 

[c32767a]

Without detailed information about your environment, this is just speculation but I would check and make sure your DHCP options are set correctly.

The fact that you're getting the windows stop message means that at least the first stage of the boot process is completing and the boot loader is having a problem finding the 2nd stage boot executable. Typically, that info is set in your AD domain and provided by the MS DHCP server. If you're rolling your own non-MS solution, you'll need to make sure your DHCP server is returning the right information.

Unfortunately, I haven't done a windows PXE environment in eons, so I can't tell you what exactly needs to be done, but the FreeNAS's part in this is very simplistic, as long as the files the client asks for are present on the TFTP server, it will serve them. The devil is in the details of your DHCP config and the windows preboot loader. Once it's running, it needs to know where to get the next stage boot image.

One thing that might help you is to set your switch to mirror the traffic from the ethernet port your Windows client is on and then use Wireshark to look at what it's doing on the network. Right before windows errors out, you should see a request go out to load the next component in the boot process.. That will likely be where your problem lies.