Windows Provisioning made Easy!

picassio · March 16, 2020, 2:33am

Hi,

The installation look fine, i am using community template without edit. But after this stage, VM still have this error.

Sorry because new user can upload more than one image, so i use 3rd party link:

picassio · March 16, 2020, 4:06am

my unattend.xml in Panther folder:
https://pastebin.com/7DKYYu0z

UXabre · March 16, 2020, 7:15am

Hi @picassio,

Thank you for sharing this information; best delete the pastebin because it can contain data that’s better not exposes.

Anyway, from looking at that unattend.xml file, it seems the password isn’t correctly encoded. Van you verify that the password encoding, configurable on the first tab called “Operating System” of your operating system configuration in Foreman, is set to Base64-Windows?

If you observe the unattend.xml where the following content is:

<UserAccounts>
            <AdministratorPassword>
                <PlainText>false</PlainText>
                <Value> <!-- SHOULD BE BASE-64 encoded! --> </Value>
            </AdministratorPassword>
        </UserAccounts>

Good luck! I think you’re close!

picassio · March 16, 2020, 9:19am

Hi,

It is set to Base64-Windows. I don’t know why it did not encode to unattend.xml. I will check and tell you the result if it change. Thank you for your help.

picassio · March 16, 2020, 11:23am

Hi, I can provison windows server2016 with your WIMan tutorial now. The last failed was because of 2 problem:

My foreman cannot encode root password to Base64_Windows, i still have no idea about it. So I change password from XML file to use plantext.
The seconds problem is my active key end with a space.
Now all the thing work.

Thank you for your help. Your work is amazing!

UXabre · March 16, 2020, 3:43pm

Hi!

Great to hear you managed to get it to work! I’m very curious as to why base64 isn’t encoding properly but at least you managed to get this far!
Did foreman throw an error during the generation of base64-windows? Did regular base64 work? (sorry for these follow-up questions, but others might be helped by your input)

Is anybody else having issues encoding the password with base64-windows?

picassio · March 16, 2020, 4:42pm

Hi,

Here are some journal log and production log when i try to provision failed with base64_windows and foreman do not encrypt password to unattended.xml
https://pastebin.com/hZNKGF5Z
https://pastebin.com/RDXwV10W

I do not see anything wrong with foreman.

Foreman do not encrypt password to unattended.xml when using base64 or base64_windows.

tomabg · April 15, 2020, 6:05pm

Hi have you any dea what could be he problem?
In TCP dump on foreman site i see last action is a DNS request from client and awnser from server
But i dont see a http request anymore in the trace…any help or hint would be great.

tomabg · April 15, 2020, 6:35pm

i have manually copied the .c32 files as i learned CentOS 7 does have too old syslinux files…maybe now version 6.04 is too new?
What version you are using?

UXabre · April 15, 2020, 10:20pm

Hi,

As from what i can tell, you didn’t configure the " PXELinux chain iPXE" step as mentioned in my original post. Ipxe is, AFAIK the only pxe bootstrapper that can use http

Let me know if that solves your issue

Kr

tomabg · April 16, 2020, 6:56am

Hi i copied form https://boot.ipxe.org/ the following files:
ipxe.efi
ipxe.lkrn
undionly.kpxe

to /var/lib/tftpboot
in the Operating system i set PXELinux chain iPXE
are there other steps to configure “PXELinux chain iPXE”

BR
Thomas

UXabre · April 16, 2020, 7:05am

Hi @tomabg,

Looks great to me actually
What is the result of this? Still the same error?

Kind regards

tomabg · April 16, 2020, 7:15am

Hi,

unfortunatelly yes:-(

do i need some special config inside DNS?

currently i used “default” from forman config and DNS can resolve IP’s and also awnsers to the client

ipxeboot.tar (429.5 KB)

BR
Thomas

tomabg · April 16, 2020, 7:18am

it did not try to tftp the ipxe.lkrn.

UXabre · April 16, 2020, 7:28am

Hi,

Did you stop and start the build (provisioning) of this host? It seems that iPXE is not loaded at all (at least from what I can tell from your pcap)?

To answer you other question: no you don’t need to change DNS settings for this to work
I think we’ll first have to get iPXE to boot

Kr

tomabg · April 16, 2020, 7:49am

Hi,
thank you so much it starts now installation.
recreate host solves it…so it boot into ipxe

installation seems to hang now in this step…are 2 drives required in the VM? or have you an idea what is the problem now?
grafik

drz9 · April 16, 2020, 12:48pm

Hi,
so I did everything exactly as you mentioned and iPXE is starting, it acquires the foreman-token aswell but in the next step it is stuck at:
tftp:///boot/windows-x64-windows-images-JiQavrkLFtOU/wimboot
and the next error message is: !PXE strcuture was not found in UNDI driver code segment

I have the files in /var/lib/tftpboot

What to do here?

UXabre · April 16, 2020, 1:13pm

Hi @drz9,

From your provided information, I can only deduce that the “next-server” isn’t being set in iPXE for one or the other reason; as “tftp:///boot/windows-x64-windows-images-JiQavrkLFtOU/wimboot” should be something in the lines “tftp://your.local.foreman.server.com/boot/windows-x64-windows-images-JiQavrkLFtOU/wimboot” I don’t see the hostname or an ip-address here. Not sure why the next-server (option 66) would be missing; can you perhaps verify the dhcp response actually has it?

Kind regards

tomabg · April 16, 2020, 2:09pm

has sombody seen this error or have information what the installer tries to do here?
Is this maybe hyperv specific problem?

UXabre · April 16, 2020, 3:02pm

Actually i’ve had this problem in the past as well at one point… But i seem to have forgoten the solution for now… I think it has something to do with the vm settings… But i can’t recall if it is memory that needs to be sufficient or if it was a network adapter issue… When i do remember i’ll let you know, at least i can tell you that i have managed to make it run on hyper v in the past