Introduction
For a number of years, I’ve performed numerous Linux network installations on “legacy” BIOS systems with TFTP and PXELinux. This has been convenient when I’ve needed to build a lot servers, and has worked well when paired with Preseed automated installations on Debian systems or Kickstart automated installations on Enterprise Linux systems. However, BIOS has largely been superseded by UEFI; for better or worse, all computers now ship with UEFI firmware. It is also the default firmware mode on VMWare ESXi. With UEFI, PXELinux no longer works; now you must use GRUB2 over PXE. Recently I decided I wanted to learn how to do this with Debian, as I needed to install Debian 13/Trixie on four identical HPE ProLiant servers running UEFI firmware and wanted to do automated Preseed installations, as opposed to installing the OS manually on each server. This post explains how I was able to get this to work.