# Solved: Problems Booting With PXE



## firstm (Jan 7, 2009)

Hi Guys,

Up until yesterday i was able to boot up with PXE accross different VLAN's and it's been no trouble at all. But now i keep receiving the error PXE-E11: ARP Timeout whenever i try to boot up. It was working fine until about 2pm then it just stopped working. I work in a school and there are only 3 of us working in the IT and we're 99% sure we havent changed anything which would affect this.

BUT there is one type of machine, a 2007 model lenovo which is able to boot when it's in a different vlan and i believe it's network card is a broadcom 57x netxtreme, yet no other machine works at all in any vlan other then the administrative vlan (1). I'm able to ghost if i boot up with a USB on the computers but it's also alot slower then usual.

So what i'm asking is:

1) What would cause me to get the PXE-E11 error & how can i fix it.
2) Why can one machine work and no other one can.

We use CISCO switches/routers if that helps and i've setup 66 and 67 in DHCP to look for the TFTP server and filename...

Thanks in advance for your help.


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## StumpedTechy (Jul 7, 2004)

We have numerous PXE problems where I work always due to people playing with the routing and configurations (we have our own transport team that seems to like to do things without looking at what is already being done on the network).

PXE-E11: ARP timeout. 
The PXE ROM will retry the ARP request four times, if it does not get any valid ARP replies, this message is displayed. This error can be caused by a number of network and service configuration errors. The most common are: 
Setting the DHCP Class Identifier (option 60) on the DHCP server and installing the proxyDHCP on a separate machine. 
Using routers that do not respond to ARP requests.

Alot of times I find that one specific model will have problems they all display the same problems while another model will work fine.

Has any firewalls been added? Have you checked the PXE server for any changes there?


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## firstm (Jan 7, 2009)

Hi,

I checked to make sure option 60 wasn't enabled on DHCP and it wasn't. I've gone through our Cisco routers and switches and can't see anything which may have changed. No firewalls have been added recently at all. Nothing has been changed on the PXE server. I've even tried moving the TFTP server with all the files required for the PXE to work to another server which is on default VLAN and it does exactly the same thing. 

I'm sure that something has been changed somewhere along the way (probably by accident) but i just have no idea what it is.

I've gone through pretty much every google page i can find and i'm yet to find a solution, but then again i don't really know what answer i'm looking for. I've been doing some ghosting today by just changing some computers onto the default vlan and it's running extremely slow. It's taking around an hour to ghost something which would usually take 10-15 minutes. Is it possible that the ARP timeout problem with the PXE is related to slow ghosting times?

Thanks for your input.


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## firstm (Jan 7, 2009)

The problem has been fixed, there was an issue with one of our switches. Thanks anyway.


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## StumpedTechy (Jul 7, 2004)

Sorry I couldnn't be of much help but usually with the ARP stuff its something internal that ya can't figure out from a forum unless you get dumps of EVERYTHING. Thanks for letting us know what it was though.


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