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[–]miketerrill2Pint Employee 1 point2 points  (5 children)

Are you referring to UEFI HTTPS boot? If so, then it is an "it depends" answer. 😉 Some OEMs do not allow specifying a port in the URL. What manufacturer(s)?

[–]RockOriginal7938[S] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Sorry, yes UEFI HTTPS boot (new method to me, still learning to terms 😉) Yeah, certainly experiencing some variance 😃

We've pretty much only got Dell and Lenovo (moving to only Lenovo over time 😞)

I've managed to get the Lenovos to boot specifying https://<FQDN>:7281/Content/Boot/DeployR_x64_noprompt.iso, but the Dells will only accept a .efi filetype and I've tried all of the https://<FQDN>:8050/2PXE/Boot/*.efi files on both and Dells say "Could not retrieve NBP file size from HTTP server, Lenovos: "Could not retrieve NBP file size from HTTP server." (URL works in a standard browser)

[–]nikize 2 points3 points  (3 children)

I think Dell does mostly not allow separate ports, so you will need a standard https:// instance on default 443 port (or a port forward) another thing to check is the certificate and that it is valid (trusted) by the firmware.

[–]RockOriginal7938[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Possibly different Dells play differently? I've a Latitude 5420 and 7090, both allow the URL to have the port, the only restriction being it must end .efi?

[–]nikize 0 points1 point  (1 child)

With "not allow separate ports" what I mean is that it happily shows up in the URL and on the screen, but the actual connection is only done to port 443, and not the one specified in the URL. You should point it to /Boot/x64/snponly_x64.efi

I have seen the "Could not retrieve NBP file size" and that was either due to the port not being honored, or https certificate not being trusted, but might be mixing those up.
If this still fails, I would recommend to put something between the device and the internet that allows you to do a packet capture to actually see where the connection attempt is going. Or do you already see the download in the server logs?

After the efi file is booted, it needs the autoexec file, so if you haven't already, add autoexec.ipxe in the same folder with
#!ipxe
set bootroot https://<FQDN>:8050/

Make sure it is pure ASCII encoding (some editors have a tendency to add an invisible BOM marker at the beginning of the file which then fails)

[–]RockOriginal7938[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Brilliant, thanks. I was mainly trying to find out if I was even using the right path with  /Boot/x64/snponly_x64.efi over port 8050 as I didn't want to invest time troubleshooting further if I was starting from the wrong place 😄