Deployment Solution

Hi all,

Going absolutely mental with this one, maybe someone here can help.

The latest batches of Dell hardware no longer support BIOS-mode PXE as a primary boot device - "legacy" boot options have been relegated to what is effectively manual invocation.
UEFI PXE is now the primary (and only) option for fully automated hardware boot. We are a large, distributed organisation, and being able to automate reboots and rebuilds is central to our support facilities.

I'm having a world of trouble getting deployment boot options to present on UEFI PXE devices outside of one particular subnet. It's quite odd.
Everywhere else, BStrap.efi will load but will not show our bootable images, throwing a PXE-E16 error ("No offer received"). But it is loading the bootstrap - it's just not giving the boot image selection.

I am using Windows Server 2012 R2 DHCP policies to ensure the same DHCP options are provided to all UEFI requesters, using PXEClient:Arch:0000x vendor classes as per all the documentation on the matter, and I can see these requests landing in the DHCP logs; packet capture confirms everything is being sent, received, and acknowledged correctly - it's just these WinPE options which aren't showing up on any subnet. Well, except that one subnet where it does work, but there's nothing special about it - it's not hosting the DHCP server or the PXE server, so really, it should be just as broken as the others.

BIOS-mode PXE options (now handled by DHCP policy) work and continue to flawlessly provide PXE options to legacy machines. It's just UEFI PXE giving me a world of hurt.

We're running ITMS 8.1 RU2. I've (briefly) gone through the release notes for RU3/4/5/6; I've scoured Connect, I've Googled for literally hours, and I can't find anything which addresses this particular combination of symptoms.

I've spent a few days on this and have run out of options; my next step is to escalate to Symantec, but I thought I'd try here first, just in case others have seen something similar.

Anyone? Anyone at all?

Me too, I've spent a lot of time on this.  We may end up switching to SCCM but that will take too much time as I have a ton of devices to image in the next 2 days.

I'm so glad to hear someone else is having this issue! Sanity slowly restoring.

The "subnet" where it works, is this a physical subnet or a VLAN one? If it's a VLAN you could maybe configure it on a different physical switch and see if it's the switch or VLAN that "works".

There are two issues I've had in the past. First I occasionally found that with Deployment Server 6.n the "PXE-E51 No DHCP or Proxy DHCP offers received" message was overcome by inserting a hub between the switch and the NIC. Secondly with ITMS 6.0 we had one occasion where the Altiris Agent would pick up Software Delivery Policies but not download the software, but only on one subnet, others worked OK. Turned out to be the speed/duplex settings on the switch on that floor had not been set correctly (I'm afraid it was too long ago to remember the right and wrong settings).

Hi all,

Sorted this out whilst we were trying to get iPXE working. Solution posted in the thread below:

iPXE not passing PXE server name
https://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/ipxe-not-passing-pxe-server-name