Problem:
I’m provisioning bare metal HP hardware, that is using UEFI boot. I’ve not had to provision UEFI with this Foreman host before, but I’m using a process that has worked fine in the past. I have assigned the Kickstart PXEGrub2 template to the OS, and the bootloader as Grub2 UEFI This normally works fine on other foreman hosts. Then the new node is provisioning, it boots, begins the pxe process and then drops to a grub shell.
Expected outcome:
EL installation process is started from Grub post initial PXEBoot
Foreman and Proxy versions:
3.4.0
Foreman and Proxy plugin versions:
Distribution and version:
Foreman host Centos 8-stream
Other relevant data:
Reading through the logs and trying to troubleshoot the behaviour, I found across this community site Configuration Help - UEFI PXE Boot/Provision - #4 by Dirk
Which is really similar and backed up by the logs.
When I looked at the foreman host I see two grubx64.efi files in the correct locations (the foreman host is also the pxe server on this network)
/boot/efi/EFI/centos/grubx64.efi
/var/lib/tftpboot/grub2/grubx64.efi
When I look at the file sizes of these two files
-rwx------. 1 root root 2295576 Jul 19 15:30 /boot/efi/EFI/centos/grubx64.efi
-rw-r–r–. 1 root root 1893144 Nov 25 2020 /var/lib/tftpboot/grub2/grubx64.efi
there is a pretty reasonable size difference in them (similar to the thread quoted above)
I’m not sure how this could happen, as my understanding was that the grubx64.efi in the tftp root came from /boot on the foreman host, so unless this was copied in at a point in time, then later the CentOS updates put a new one in /boot that was never copied across.
Based on the thread quoted, this does seem a likely place to start for the behaviour, but before I start replacing files, I’d like to try to understand how and why these two files are so different in size.