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Press Ctrl-B for the iPXE command line...

On my new machine, as soon as I press ctrl, this prompt disappears and iPXE continues normal boot. I don't even get a chance to press B.

This is due to buggy UEFI firmware. iPXE has a work-around: You can press ESC+B instead. Note you must hold ESC while pressing B. This successfully got me to the prompt.

The guide and parts of the script assume the iPXE image is called undionly.kpxe, but this is a file meant for legacy BIOS PXE boot. Newer machines should use ipxe.efi.

On my latest machine, trying to use the legacy file shows the phrase "NBP file downloaded successfully" and then fails (obnoxiously returning me to the boot menu without any further info, or even reverting to booting from the local drive).

The new machine I built can download a boot image over HTTP instead of TFTP, which sounds nice. That said, setting up an HTTP server can paradoxically be a lot more work since they're designed to do so much more.

The IP address of the TFTP server is normally specified via the next-server option. Old version of dhcpd defaulted this to the server's IP address, but newer version do not. It is necessary to add a line to dhcpd.conf like:

next-server 10.0.0.1;

The firmware PXE loader might not care about this option, but iPXE does, leading to an error: https://ipxe.org/err/3c0920