[andrewjf]

The worst thing about UEFI HTTP boot is the utter lack of information to debug anything that's gone wrong. Whether that's the DHCP filename option is some wrong format for whatever stupid mode the UEFI is in, or there's some dhcp relay issue. It literally tells you almost nothing besides "can't get NBP file size".

The error messages seem to be written by people on a happy path who don't know how utterly broken almost everything about networking and DHCP even is.

And this is all IPv4! The IPv6 stuff is even more cryptic with different DHCP options and dealing with RAs and managed-flag, other-flag, etc.

It's infuriating. And I work on a team that writes code to generate all these things for automating bare metal for a living.

[wmf]

It's probably a good idea to follow the path of this article and get everything working in a VM first where booting is faster and it's easier to sniff packets. Once you have vanilla OVMF working you can try booting real servers.