Clonezilla Lite Server does not start to restore in clients with VirtualBox

[santopitar]

Hello.

I am a high school teacher and I have been using Clonezilla Lite Server for some time to do an internship with students. We use VirtualBox to clone a virtual machine (server) into two others (clone1 and clone2). The fact is that it has always worked well, but this year it fails. We are using this version that we downloaded in September 2024 (at the beginning of the course): clonezilla-live-20240715-noble-amd64

I explain what happens to us: +0 Starting situation:

+ The 'server' machine has 2 disks:

• disk0 - Operating System - It has W10 and Linux Mint installed in dual boot.
• disk1 - Data.

• The 'clone1' and 'clone2' machines have only 1 disk, the same size as disk0 of the 'server' machine.
• All 3 machines have UEFI BIOS enabled in VirtualBox. + All 3 machines are configured in "NAT Network" mode in VirtualBox:
  • This makes all 3 networked and VirtualBox acts as DHCP.
  • This is the ideal situation for each student to be able to do their practice autonomously, without affecting the others.

-1 We start the 'server' machine with Clonezilla Live, and create an image of its disk0 that we save on disk1 of the same machine, which we only use for that. -2 We restart the 'server' machine with Clonezilla Live, but this time in "Lite Server" mode:

• We configure everything appropriately so that the image created in the previous step is restored on the two clients (clone1 and clone2) by PXE, and we leave the 'server' on waiting for the clones.

-3 We turn on the clones, they connect to the server and receive IP but... the restoration does not start. I attach the screen where the clones and the server are.

At first I thought it was a bug in the Clonezilla version used, but today I tried with the latest version available (2025.03.03-oracular) and with the one we used in the previous course that worked fine (2023.04.26-lunar). With both it fails in the same way. I think the problem is in VirtualBox, because last year we used version 7.0 and this year the new 7.1. Also the screen that indicates the PXE connection is different.

I attach the screen that remains in the clones (they connect to the server but the restoration does not start), and the one that remained last course when it did work. They are different and I think it is proof that the problem is in something in the configuration in VirtualBox.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.