Set a One-Time PXE Boot Override with IPMItool

Case background

A customer needed to reinstall 1,000 servers: NF5270M3, NF5270M4, SA5212H2 and SA5212M4. Entering BIOS or selecting the NIC manually with F11 on every server was impractical. Their BMC/IPMI management addresses were already configured.

Set the next boot device

Substitute the BMC address and configured credentials in the source command. All option prefixes below use ASCII hyphens:

ipmitool -H <BMC_IP> -I lanplus -U <BMC_USER> -P <BMC_PASSWORD> chassis bootdev pxe

For interactive use, -a can prompt for the password instead of placing it in the command line:

ipmitool -H <BMC_IP> -I lanplus -U <BMC_USER> -a chassis bootdev pxe

This command requests a boot override; it does not itself restart the server. At the next restart the source’s systems boot from PXE once, then return to the BIOS boot order on subsequent restarts.

The source example uses the default legacy boot selection. For a system that requires UEFI PXE and supports the relevant IPMI flag, use chassis bootdev pxe options=efiboot. Do not add options=persistent when the intention is a one-time override.