[syslinux] UEFI bootable USB stick to allow PXE booting with USB ethernet adaptors?

[Dan Jackson]

Hello,

It's an Acer Swift SF114-31.

The existing PXE server that we are trying to boot from is Microsoft Configuration Manager (also known as SCCM or MECM). I tried putting the boot image itself on a USB stick manually but while I got the initial Configuration Manager wallpaper appearing, after a short period it just rebooted itself. It does appear that there may be a native ConfigMgr way to create a minimal USB stick without needing to include everything and the kitchen sink, so I'll be investigating that as well.

The USB ethernet adapters are Realtek based. I put together a USB stick with an EFI Shell, a copy of the Realtek USB UNDI EFI driver and a copy of iPXE and this combination was after some fiddling able to initialise the network adapter, however it's unsuccessful in booting from the PXE image. Hence why I was investigating whether Syslinux might be able to help in some way.

Thanks,
Dan Jackson (Network & Systems Engineer)
Long Road Sixth Form College
Cambridge, UK

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael D. Setzer II <mikes at guam.net>
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2023 10:25 AM
To: Dan Jackson <djackson at longroad.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [syslinux] UEFI bootable USB stick to allow PXE booting with USB ethernet adaptors?

CAUTION: This email originated from outside of Long Road Sixth Form College. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognise the sender and know the content is safe.

Couple of things?
1. What brand of laptops are these that don't include Ethernet
adaptor, but do support UEFI?? Perhaps knowing hardware info?
2. I've use PXE boot on a local network with syslinux long ago with
regular ethernet in PCs, but never got UEFI to work with syslinux.
3. Have used grub4dos to create USBs that have both the regular
and UEFI booting on the same flash. My disk imaging project then
load its kernel and ramdisk.lzma files into ram, but I've included
regular ethernet in the setup, but don't have wifi adapters.
4. What is the PXE image file? Not sure why it can't be put on a
bootiable flash?
5. What kind of image is this. Window's what or Linux What.
6. What kind of USB ethernet adapters are you talking about?

Think lot more info would be needed.


On 20 Jul 2023 at 8:31, Dan Jackson via Syslinux wrote:

To:                     "syslinux at syslinux.org" <syslinux at syslinux.org>
Date sent:              Thu, 20 Jul 2023 08:31:23 +0000
Subject:                [syslinux] UEFI bootable USB stick to allow PXE
booting with USB
        ethernet adaptors?
From:                   Dan Jackson via Syslinux <syslinux at syslinux.org>
Send reply to:          Dan Jackson <djackson at longroad.ac.uk>

> Hello,
>
> At my workplace we have some laptops that don't have a built in Ethernet adaptor and don't natively support PXE booting using a USB Ethernet adaptor.
>
> Is it possible to create a UEFI bootable USB stick with Syslinux that can somehow kickstart the PXE boot process using the USB Ethernet adaptor? If so, how would we do that?
>
> Unfortunately due to the nature of the boot image, simply writing the boot image to a USB stick and trying to boot off that does not work, we specifically need to PXE boot it.
>
> Thanks,
> Dan Jackson (Network & Systems Engineer)
> Long Road Sixth Form College
> Cambridge, UK
>
> Thank you for your email which we will respond to as quickly as we can. Please be aware that to support the wellbeing of our staff and students, Long Road Sixth Form College does not routinely respond to emails outside of our usual working hours.
>
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+------------------------------------------------------------+
 Michael D. Setzer II - Computer Science Instructor (Retired)
 mailto:mikes at guam.net
 mailto:msetzerii at gmail.com
 Guam - Where America's Day Begins
 G4L Disk Imaging Project maintainer
 http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/
+------------------------------------------------------------+



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