[ipxe-devel] ipxe sanboot iso boot with keep-alive disabled

[Gabriel Barazer]

Hi,

I'm new to the list and I just subscribed to report a bug found in the sanboot command while trying to boot from an ISO image file hosted on a web server with keep-alive disabled, ipxe (tested last git commit f6840ba83e60631e6561a957f11867b206edd7d9). Enabling Keep-Alive on the server instantly solved the problem (after 2 days trying to find the cause, because there is no debug statements at this location in the code)

iPXE sanboot command first sends a HEAD request to assess if the requested file has a fixed length fisze and is capable of Range requests. The Keep-Alive header is also sent , but if the web server disable it, it send the Connection:close header with the response to the HEAD request. iPXE then freezes and is unable to boot. A quick fix could be to disable the Keep-Alive function in iPXE, because it won't bring any speed improvement.

HTH

Gabriel