Comment 18 for bug 1639202

Alright so the problem at present appears to be that the machine is pxe booting off of a nic with a mac address that is not showing up after the kernel boots.

The way the boot works is the bios/efi launches a pxe network stack. This typically makes a dhcp request. The DHCP server responds with an IP address, and the address of the PXE/TFTP server *(in this case the maas server). The network stack firmware on the client then requests the kernel, initramfs and kernel arguments from the PXE server. The bios/efi pxe network stack then downloads this, and executes the kernel.

One of the arguments maas is responding with BOOTIF=01-9c-eb-e8-3c-52-cc. This means the original pxe request originates from this mac address. When the initramfs starts it runs a script function called configure_networking that attempts to set up the BOOTIF=01-9c-eb-e8-3c-52-cc NIC, but it doesn't appear to exist to the OS.

This could mean a few things.
- The NIC doing the initial pxe request is different than the usb-c one. Is there a chance that there's a wireless nic that has a pxe stack that you've configured? I know some newer machines are able to pxe boot off of their network cards so this would be useful to check.
- The mac address is changing between the pxe request and the OS boot.
- IPv6 is in the mix. Are you attempting to boot via ipv6?
- The PXE server is responding with the incorrect mac address in BOOTIF.
The last two can be checked by looking at /var/log/rackd.log on your maas server. You should be able to grep for 01-9c-eb-e8-3c-52-cc or 01-84-7b-eb-55-c1-95 in the rackd.log to see which nic is making the pxe request. If 01-9c-eb-e8-3c-52-cc shows up in the rackd.log then it's pretty definitive that the issue is booting using a nic with that mac somehow.

Please check the above and let me know what you discover.

Thanks,
Dave.