So I’ve been trying to get iPXE chainloading to work and I’ve been using the iLO virtual serial console over SSH to verify and debug. iPXE has a DCHP debug build option which you can enable by doing make bin/undionly.kpxe DEBUG=dhcp. However, when you do this, you will find that each line of output on the iLO virtual serial console output overwrites the previous line, creating a big illegible mess. Fortunately, you can build iPXE with only serial output support, so that you can actually read the debug messages on the iLO virtual serial console.

A few notes and rants about managing SSH keys with HP’s extremely annoying iLO interface. The iLO ssh console does not support fetching SSH keys over HTTPS. This prevents you keeping them somewhere useful like github. When you upload a SSH key and it fails, the iLO web interface will tell you that it needs a PEM-formatted DSA public key. You will find that ssh-keygen has no way to produce this.