The typical method of installing Fedora on a desktop distribution is via some physical media (CD/DVD once upon a time, USB sticks these days). Fedora also supports PXE boot installation. I ended up doing a PXE install for some recent hardware that was shipped to me as that was the best supported method. The Fedora instructions are good but I still ran into a few hiccups. These are my notes which might be useful for others (or be wrong, YMMV). This was also a UEFI only setup.

A very hand-wavy explanation of what happens with the PXE Boot protocol is that the booting computer does a DHCP request to get an IP address and in addition to the IP address the booting computer gets back information about a server and what file to get off the server. If your home network setup is like mine, there is a router which serves as the DHCP server for all computers. Setting up another DHCP server on the network is a recipe for a bad time. The PXE boot protocol does include support for having a proxy DHCP server for cases like this and there is software to do so. I’m lazy and didn’t want to set that up for something which would only be temporary. The option I chose was to run an ethernet cable directly from the booting machine to another machine acting as a server. I used the 192.168.0.X as my network space and set it up on the server

# ifconfig <interface name> 192.168.0.2

and setup a dhcpd.conf:

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
 default-lease-time 600;
 max-lease-time 7200;
 ddns-update-style none;

 option routers 192.168.0.1;
 option domain-name-servers 196.168.0.1;
 option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
 next-server 192.168.0.2;

 host my-booting-machine {
 hardware ethernet 00:01:73:02:3B:9C;
 fixed-address 192.168.0.123;
 }

 filename "uefi/shim.efi";
}

I have a really limited networking background but the important points are setting the MAC address for your target booting system correctly, making sure next-server is set to the TFTP server (same machine as DHCP in my case) and not munging up an existing IP name space.

The tftp server mostly takes care of itself. I had to unblock tftp in the firewall

# firewall-cmd --add-service=tftp

When something doesn’t work (I say when and not if because I’m cynical), you can enable some logging and run some tests. The suggested command in the Fedora install instructions journalctl --unit dhcpd --since -2m --follow is very helpful to see if the DHCP request is making it to your server. I used that plus some wireshark to first discover I needed to use a different port on the machine for PXE booting and then that I typoed the MAC address in the DHCP configuration file.

If your DHCP is working but TFTP is failing, you can do a short test on another computer

$ tftp
(to) <ip addr of server>
tftp> get
(files) <name of file in your tftp path e.g. uefi/shim.efi>

If everything is setup correctly, you should be able grab the file. If not, you can check the journal on the server to see if that’s throwing any errors.

Make sure you use the grub files specified. These are set up to do the network install and download from the internet. This sounds obvious but was yet another case of me not reading the fine manual properly and wondering why things aren’t working.