Had a Dell OptiPlex 3080 at a clinic in Springfield just refuse to boot from the network

Honestly, I was setting up a new imaging station and the PXE boot kept failing with a PXE-E53 error. I spent an hour checking the BIOS settings and the DHCP scope before I found the issue. The onboard NIC had a firmware version from 2021 that was buggy with our newer WDS server. Flashed it to the latest from Dell's site and it worked first try. Anyone else run into weird firmware problems with recent OptiPlex models?

3 comments

3 Comments

jenny_hall4d ago

It's that same old story where nothing is ever just plug and play anymore. You buy a new thing expecting it to work, but it needs five updates first. My coffee maker had a firmware update last week. Feels like everything is half-broken out of the box now, waiting on a patch. Makes you miss when a network card was just a network card.

the_xena4d ago

Used to believe firmware was just for adding new features. Then I had a whole cart of tablets that wouldn't connect to the building Wi-Fi. The fix was a two-year-old security patch they'd never received. Now I check version numbers on everything before I even try to set it up. It's less about getting new stuff and more about making the basic things actually work.

young.nora4d ago

That firmware thing is such a sneaky problem. We had a batch of 3090s last year that would get stuck in a PXE loop, and it turned out to be the same kind of issue. Which specific firmware version did you end up flashing to? I'm just curious if it's the same one we landed on, or if Dell has put out a newer fix since then.