Arch Linux

Wild Penguin

Member

Registered: 2015-03-19

Posts: 354

UEFI Netboot: IPXE connection times out

Hi,

I have used the Arch Linux Netboot UEFI image before and it has worked. But since recent(-ish) times, I just can not get them to work (not that I use them that often).

The problem happens when iPXE tries to contact https://ipxe.archlinux.org/releng/netbo … linux.ipxe - the attempt fails because "connection timed out". Anyone seen this before, when trying to connect to "the outside" (WAN) instead of a LAN address?

After the timeout, I'm dropped to the iPXE shell. I can ping computers in my LAN, but it seems I have quite some problems pinging anything in WAN (internet). I did manage to ping *one* host, which seems to *not* have an IPv6 address. So my suspicion is that iPXE has problems connecting with IPv6 (despite it is working on other computers in my LAN) but does work for IPv4. And since archlinux.org has an IPv6 record, it fails in connecting.

Any ideas how to find what is wrong? Can iPXE (downloadable from the address I've linked) give any more indepth information?

I can see with the help of the very limited iPXE shell, that it has gotten a valid IPv4 address, netmask and gateway. I can even go to the 'config' utility and see the settings (*). I can run autoboot and see that it get's again a valid configuration via dhcp - also an IPv6 one!

Despite "everything" working in my LAN for other devices, I can not rule out configuration problems in my LAN. But I find that quite unlikely. I could try to find another LAN, or disable IPv6 temporarily, to see if the issue goes away...

Cheers!

*) The iPXE shell is quite limited and in some ways half-broken, as it does not recognize CTRL key as a modifier at all! This means if I forget to set -c to a small value when running ping, I can not exit. If I run the config utility, I can not edit anything or exit the utility, since CTRL+X is needed to confirm and exit the utility

p.s. this may be more of a iPXE problem, but since I got these problems with the Arch Netboot images, I think this would be the most appropriate place to ask first?

p.s.s. I've had this problem with three different computers connected to my LAN. As far as I can see, I have no problems using other devices in my LAN and connecting outside!

p.s.s.s You might ask, why netboot? Well, occasionally, I I prefer to use it since copying a single small file to a USB key which already has an EFI partition is much, much more handy than burning the whole Arch image. I could try to set up a PXE environment, and I actually already have. This wiki page is a bit discouraging, since it says the archiso only supports BIOS-style PXE booting.

Last edited by Wild Penguin (2022-01-26 20:10:48)