[syslinux] HP Probook 6570b - Unable to locate configuration file

[Joel Dahl]

Hi,

We currently use pxelinux and tftp-hpa for pxe booting new machines and
installing our OS of choice. This has worked great for the past year, and
just about every HP laptop we've tried so far has worked flawlessy, until
now...…

We recently bought a bunch of HP ProBook 6570b laptops but couldn't get them
to work with our pxelinux setup. What we see is that the 6570b stops at
the "Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/XXXXXXX" phase. We have a large amount of
different HP laptop models, and we've never seen these problems before. The
6560b (which seems to be almost identical, at least physically) works great,
for example.

Output from a non-working 6570b:

gPXE initialising devices…
gPXE 1.0.0 -- Open Source Boot Firmware -- http://etherboot.org
Features: AoE HTTPS iSCSI FTP HTTP DNS TFTP COMBOOT ELF MultiBoot PXE bzImage PXEXT
DHCP (net0 10:60:4b:4a:93:ee) using cached

PXELINUX 4.06 2012-10-23 Copyright (C) 1994-2012 H. Peter Anvin et al
!PXE entry point found (we hope) at 845A:03B2 via plan A
UNDI code segment at 845A len 0814
UNDI data segment at 84DC len 2E40
Getting cached packet  01 02 03
My IP address seems to be 0A651889 10.101.24.137
ip=10.101.24.137:10.101.24.20:10.101.24.1:255.255.255.0
BOOTIF=01-10-60-4b-4a-93-ee
SYSUUID=977d2b5e-911c-e211-80b4-08c97201c0c8
TFTP prefix:
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/977d2b5e-911c-e211-80b4-08c97201c0c8

Here it waits for a couple of minutes, and then tries to
load pxelinux.cfg/01-10-60-4b-4a-93-ee, and it continues like this. This takes
forever. Finally it tries to load pxelinux.cfg/default, but fails and the
following error message is displayed:

Unable to locate configuration file
Boot failed: press a key to retry, or wait for reset...

Looking at the tftpd messages on the server when booting a non-working HP 6570b
doesn't reveal much:

Jan 11 16:07:35 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92872]: RRQ from 10.101.24.137 filename gpxelinux.0
Jan 11 16:07:35 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92872]: tftp: client does not accept options
Jan 11 16:07:35 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92873]: RRQ from 10.101.24.137 filename gpxelinux.0
<nothing more happens>

This is what it looks like with a working 6560b:

Jan 11 16:10:24 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92877]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename gpxelinux.0
Jan 11 16:10:24 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92877]: tftp: client does not accept options
Jan 11 16:10:24 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92878]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename gpxelinux.0
Jan 11 16:10:24 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92879]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename pxelinux.cfg/7c5c1483-cf9e-e111-b400-4064b9000004
Jan 11 16:10:24 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92880]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename pxelinux.cfg/01-a0-b3-cc-be-5f-6a
Jan 11 16:10:24 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92881]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename pxelinux.cfg/0A651885
Jan 11 16:10:24 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92882]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename pxelinux.cfg/0A65188
Jan 11 16:10:24 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92883]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename pxelinux.cfg/0A6518
Jan 11 16:10:24 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92884]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename pxelinux.cfg/0A651
Jan 11 16:10:24 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92885]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename pxelinux.cfg/0A65
Jan 11 16:10:24 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92886]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename pxelinux.cfg/0A6
Jan 11 16:10:24 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92887]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename pxelinux.cfg/0A
Jan 11 16:10:25 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92888]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename pxelinux.cfg/0
Jan 11 16:10:25 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92889]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename pxelinux.cfg/default
Jan 11 16:10:25 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92890]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename menu.c32
Jan 11 16:10:25 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92891]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename pxelinux.cfg/default
Jan 11 16:10:30 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92892]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename Boot/startrom.0 remapped to windows/7/startrom.0
Jan 11 16:10:30 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92893]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename bootmgr.exe remapped to windows/7/bootmgr.exe
Jan 11 16:10:30 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92894]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename \Boot\Fonts\wgl4_boot.ttf remapped to windows/7/Fonts/wgl4_boot.ttf
Jan 11 16:10:30 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92894]: tftp: client does not accept options
Jan 11 16:10:30 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92895]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename \Boot\Fonts\wgl4_boot.ttf remapped to windows/7/Fonts/wgl4_boot.ttf
Jan 11 16:10:30 pxeinstall in.tftpd[92896]: RRQ from 10.101.24.133 filename \boot.ini remapped to windows/7/boot.ini
<…... and it continues>

We have single server running pxe, tftpd and dhcpd. We're currently using
pxelinux 4.06, tftp-hpa 5.2 and isc-dhcpd 4.2.4. Configuration looks as
follows:

# dhcpd.conf
option domain-name "xxx.local";
option domain-name-servers 172.16.1.111,172.16.1.112;
default-lease-time 86400;
max-lease-time 604800;
authoritative;
ddns-update-style none;

subnet 10.101.24.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
        range 10.101.24.100 10.101.24.199;
        filename "gpxelinux.0";
        next-server 10.101.24.20;
        option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
        option broadcast-address 10.101.24.255;
        option routers 10.101.24.1;
}

# tftp-hpa, started with the following flags:
-p -m /usr/tftpboot/tftpd.remap -s /usr/tftpboot -B 1024 --ipv4 --verbosity 4"

# ls from /usr/tftpboot
gpxelinux.0
menu.c32
pxelinux.cfg
tftpd.remap
windows

# /usr/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default
default menu.c32
prompt 0
timeout 100

menu title PXE Boot

label Windows 7 x64 
  menu label Windows 7 x64
  menu default
  kernel Boot/startrom.0


Any ideas? What could cause this behavior with this particular laptop model? :-)

-- 
Joel