Exploring UEFI Shell BIOS Networking Capabilities: DHCP Server Interaction & Network Booting

We have new computers that have a choice when booting: boot from disk (but there is no system on it), BIOS Setup, UEFI Shell. I would like to check if they are connected to the network (there is a DHCP server in it that would assign them addresses), or boot from the network to install the system.

Question1: Does UEFI Shell have the ability to do this in some simple way, something like "load network", "ifconfig -a dhcp", and then it shows that the computer got an IP address on the eth0 interface from the server DHCP (+ what address, mask, from what server), or that it didn't get it?

Question2: is there any "boot network" command, after which the computer will ask the DHCP server to boot from the network, and after receiving an answer that gives it such a possibility, the system will boot from the network (with the possibility that the system installer will start in this way)?

I tried to browse the help for UEFI shell but found nothing to be helpful - what seemed to make sense, when trying to use it only gave some error messages, of which I could only understand that something is not configured - but how to configure it?

Why does it have to be from Shell? There is / cannot use standard Boot from LAN?

No, that's where the problem is. I was hoping that if they did not give it, it is something equivalent in UEFI, but how do I find it and recognize it?

Specify the model of the board or the entire workstation, if it's a branded unit, we will look for. Today everything is so strange that I will not be surprised how it will not be. Maybe PLOP or GRUB etc. has such possibilities, it is such an emergency solution to consider as if there was no other way out. This is how I patch the "missing" boot options.

From memory I can say that these are Brix computers with a J1900 processor - I think such .

_jta_ wrote:

UEFI Shell - what can be done with it,

You can do a lot - if it works that way.
http://www.sysadminshare.com/2012/01/efi-shell-commands.html
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/efi-shells-and-scripting
https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?305...-efi-shell-from-filesystem-device-not-wroking

_jta_ wrote:

No, that's where the problem is

http://www.dodgycoder.net/2014/08/how-to-setup-gigabyte-brix-gb-bxbt-2807.html

But can this Brix boot from LAN or not? This UEFI on Brix has some 'ifconfig', 'ipconfig' commands, but I don't know what to do to get them to work.
Somehow I didn't notice that there was a 'lanboot' command in help, mentioned in this first link, but maybe I missed it - I'll check it at the earliest opportunity.

It seems not. If there is a bigger manual for it, than two pages of "instructions" are commonly available, please send it. Also upload screenshots from UEFI. In the good old assembly language GIGABYTE had a shortcut to run advanced options that were normally invisible. Being in the BIOS, you called them by pressing Ctrl + F1 at the same time, maybe it will work here as well. Recently, there was an example of a UEFI laptop in this forum with an unusual architecture that prevents the installation of Windows older than 8, so it may simply not be there.

I looked through all the BIOS settings and it turned out that you can boot from the network - it looks like it works, anyway it gets information from DHCP and looks where it can boot from - it doesn't, because I haven't configured it yet. However, I am curious what UEFI can do, I took some pictures of the screen.

If you have a DHCP server, I suggest you also set up a PXE server and run PXE Boot via UEFI Networking (UEFI Boot). On the server computer, you must properly configure the DHCP server, PXE and TFTP (or HTTP) communication.

greetings