Erratic PXE issues

Christovan153's picture
Christovan153
November 5th, 2009

DS 6.9 SP2 (slowly moving to NS 7)
(One server running the DS software + PXE, as well as PXE running on the DHCP server as I wasn't able to get it to successfully run without the PXE services on the MS DHCP box.

Sometimes, I have noticed that when I schedule a job to a PC, and it reboots, the PC will fail to even see the PXE server.

I believe it gives the error PXE-E55: media test failure.  It's weird because the PC is connected, and if I simply CTRL-ALT-DEL the PC when i see this, it will come up fine the next time around 100% of the time.

Could this be an issue with the PC? the Network? Switch?  

Any ideas / suggestions about this?

Thanks!

 

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bhawver's picture
bhawver
2 weeks 2 days ago

Error

Based on your error message it is either with the NIC on the computer, the ethernet cable, the switch port or a combination.

When you are in Windows, are you able to browse the network, Internet perform normal operations on your network?  If so, that tells me the NIC is operating fine and the problem is probably with the switch port and it is probably not auto-negotiating properly.  You might set the switch port to 10, 100 or 1GB instead of auto-negotiating and see if that helps.

If you have intermittent problems in Windows, I would change out your NIC or plug it into another port to see if the connection gets better.

0 votes
mclemson's picture
mclemson
2 weeks 2 days ago

Are all systems on the same

Are all systems on the same network segment?  If you use multiple VLANs, without some work at getting the network config right, you've got to keep them on the same VLAN.

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Christovan153's picture
Christovan153
2 weeks 2 days ago

 Different VLANs.  probably

 Different VLANs.  probably spread around 4 or 5.

One of our network guys mentioned STP as a possible culprit, so I am going to try and re-arrange the boot order so that network boot isn't the very first one, and see if that adds enough of a delay for the port / nic to negotiate successfully. 

Will post back if that helped out.

Chris

0 votes
mclemson's picture
mclemson
2 weeks 2 days ago

Test the theory, confirm error message

Chris,

You can test the theory by making sure all systems are on the same VLAN -- DS server, PXE server, and client.  If it works, move the client to a separate VLAN and try again.

Are you sure PXE-E55: media test failure is the correct error message?  I thought PXE-E55 was DHCP; media test failure is PXE-E61.  These will be very different to troubleshoot, so please reply back.

0 votes