PXE/iPXE booting the N100/N305 Topton and CWWK mini PCs?

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sirbirdie

New Member
Sep 3, 2023
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Hello,

I recently picked up a few of the Topton N100 and CWWK N305 to play around with a Kubernetes cluster at home and I was hoping to network boot these. The Topton unit is advertised to support PXE and I confirmed with CWWK that the unit I bought is also supposed to support PXE.

Looking in the BIOS, there is a "Network Stack" option that you can enable:bios_network_stack.jpg

But I've bought a couple of Topton N5105 (with i225-V NICs) units in the past and whenever I enable this, booting becomes significantly slower while I assume it's waiting for a DHCP address and when that happens I can see some of the IP information in the BIOS. But these new N100 and N305 units seem to not have that delay and after flipping the "Network Stack" option to Enabled and looking in the BIOS after a boot there's no IP information there.

I'm running VyOS as my main router and looking through that for DHCP requests using monitor log dhcp server I can see DHCP requests from other devices:

Sep 03 12:15:24 dhcpd[21590]: DHCPREQUEST for 10.136.0.14 from [mac] ([omitted]) via br0.136
Sep 03 12:15:24 dhcpd[21590]: DHCPACK on 10.136.0.14 to [mac] ([omitted]) via br0.136


But nothing from the N100 or N305 devices while booting so it appears they're never even trying to contact the DHCP server?

I tried iPXE instead, building it with make bin-x86_64-efi/snponly.efi and copying the resulting EFI file to a USB stick and I can successfully boot into iPXE:
ipxe_ifstat.jpg

But when I run ifstat it shows that it detects no interfaces (there's not output). So I suspect the BIOS isn't actually initializing anything whenever the "Network Stack" option is flipped to Enabled?

Has someone been able to get these to boot over the network using either PXE or iPXE?

I know that iPXE doesn't have any native drivers for the i225-V or i226-V NICs which is why I'm building the snponly.efi target for iPXE which from my understanding would rely on the BIOS/UEFI to initialize and provide drivers for the NICs?

Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask, feel free to point me to a better place :)!

Thank you
 

sirbirdie

New Member
Sep 3, 2023
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I just got some time to try wake on LAN on my CWWK N305 unit and no, that unfortunately seems to also not be working.

I've also gotten it confirmed from Topton that the units indeed do not support PXE (but the product page still advertises that they support this). CWWK felt more understanding than Topton in the beginning and said they'd check with their technology department but never got back to me despite a couple of reminders and now it feels like they're stalling. I've applied for a refund for the CWWK units, it's unfortunately too late for me to do that with the Topton units via AliExpress but I might check with my credit card company instead.
 
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sirbirdie

New Member
Sep 3, 2023
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Just to tie this off, CWWK did in the end provide me with an updated BIOS that does support PXE. The performance is for some reason quite degraded, but I can live with that. Here's a PassMark run before the BIOS was updated and here's a run after.
 
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thepsyborg

New Member
Oct 19, 2023
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Holy moly, that's...a hefty performance impact.

I mean, good of them to get it working at all, but. Yikes.