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Troubleshooting › Boot Server or DHCP Server Not Functioning Properly

Boot Server or DHCP Server Not Functioning Properly

Symptom:

If you have the DHCP server and the boot server on the same system, one of the servers may stop functioning properly. This is because both the DHCP server and the boot server listen at UDP port 67.

Solution:

If you have installed the DHCP server and the boot server on the same machine, ensure to either disable the boot server at the time of installing the manager or scalability server, or configure the boot server to stop listening at port 67. You must also configure the DHCP server so that a booting PXE client can be notified that there is a listening boot server on the network.

To configure the boot server to stop listening at port 67

  1. Create a configuration policy for the boot server, if one does not exist, and modify the following policy settings under DSM, Scalability Server, OSIM, ManagedPC, Server:
  2. Apply the policy to the boot server that co-exists with the DHCP server.

To configure the DHCP server

Configure the DHCP server by adding option 60 (class identifier) to the responses that the DHCP server sends to PXE clients. Depending on the operating system on which DHCP server is installed, perform the following steps:

Windows

  1. Open DHCP Configuration and Management, right-click the server, and select Set Predefined Options.
  2. Add option 60 to the defined options list with the value as "PXEClient".

Linux

  1. Set the value of "vendor-class-identifier" option to "PXEClient"

As described in the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) Specification Version 2.1 (1999 by Intel Corporation), the PXE clients will now contact the boot server on the DHCP server's system using UDP port 4011 to get boot instructions. This enables the OSIM Boot Server to serve the PXE clients. There is no dynamic OSIM boot server assignment in this case. The OSIM boot server will not serve PXE clients that have been served by a different DHCP server, unless forwarded to the Boot Server using option 43.

Note: With PXE 2.x clients, it is still possible to assign a different boot server via DHCP option 43 (encapsulated vendor-specific options) as described in Tech Document TEC381737.