Thankfully Intel cards have iSCSI initiators in their firmware, so I setup a ZFS volume to make my HTPC diskless to attempt to stress the file server a bit more and generally just play with things as I tend to do.

So I added some settings to my ISC DHCP daemon under my shared network stanza to pass IQN/server settings to the Intel I350 card (82574 etc would work equally well here):

shared-network "VLAN-451" {
 default-lease-time 720000;
 option domain-name "p2.iscsi.frankd.lab";
 option domain-name-servers ns.frankd.lab;
  subnet 172.17.2.128 netmask 255.255.255.128 {
  range 172.17.2.144 172.17.2.239;
 }
 host intel-htpc1 {
  hardware ethernet a0:36:9f:03:99:7c;
  filename "";
  option root-path "iscsi:172.17.2.130::::iqn.2014-12.lab.frankd:htpc1";
 }
}

Voila, the card came up, grabbed DHCP settings and immediately initiated a connection! Awesome, the first thing to go right so far!  I admit I briefly spent some time trying to get iPXE to work with the Realtek card, but I ran into issues and just decided to use something I had laying around to get up and running quicker. The onboard Realtek is now for regular network data only, I might get a single port Intel card since I don’t need MPIO to this machine.

I imaged Win2012 Server to a USB stick using Rufus and plugged it in, it saw the drive and installed to it. I can’t believe things are going so easy/well for once! Then the system reboots. And it mounts the volume. And the Windows logo comes up. Then an error message comes up saying it couldn’t boot. Right away I knew it wasn’t getting past the BIOS calls to the disk (which were taken care of by the Intel NIC), and some Googling came up with horrible answers until I found an IBM document saying a new Intel driver fixes the issue — in a very indirect way. They don’t specify what, but it apparently has something to do with the iBFT tables that are created for the handoff. So I downloaded the newest drivers, put them on the USB stick and I installed Windows 2012 Server AGAIN. This time I loaded the newest version of the network drivers off the USB stick before even partitioning the disk, though.

The machine rebooted..

 

And..

 

IT WORKED! I was up and running. I installed the User Experience stuff so I could get Netflix/Hulu up easy, downloaded nVidia drivers and am now getting my Steam games downloaded to the machine — although I could stream off my workstation/gaming PC. It can’t hurt to have more than one machine with them installed in case either one of them dies and I need to go blow some pixels up to relieve some stress though, right?