8 ms·
Bootimus – A Self-Contained PXE and HTTP Boot Server
- bzmrgonz 3mo agoWhat does this have over netboot.xyz ??
- garybuk 3mo agoAuthor of Bootimus Here - It's not based on some mental Ansible system with a CI/CD Pipeline tied in github to get a freaking custom ISO to show on the menu. That being said, Bootimus can chainload to netboot.xyz if you so wish.
- happyPersonR 3mo agoMade something similar at work a bunch of years back…. :) good to see people still thinking of this stuff and making modern versions That being said what may be more useful is a EFI binary you can push to a motherboard that does this with a tpm key
- Joel_Mckay 3mo agoSome projects have been around for over a decade =3 https://fogproject.org/ https://fogproject.org/ https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject
- XorNot 3mo agohttps://github.com/danderson/netboot/tree/main/pixiecore https://github.com/danderson/netboot/tree/main/pixiecore
- happyPersonR 3mo agoYeah all of these rely on layer 2 or dhcp relay and are really ipv4 only solutions. Not to discount what the fog guys had… love what they made :) Look at ironic for something better. What we eventually ended up with after a couple of iterations was decidedly better for our use case :) But sadly doesn’t exist in the outside world yet :(.
- aesh2Xa1 3mo agoCould you share your case's details? It sounds like you wanted better L3/IPv6 support and figured out a clean way to achieve it.
- happyPersonR 3mo agoYes!! So.... worked at a telco on a telco cloud solution, and ipv4 addresses are expensive. LAN/RFC1918 doesn't work at scale of hundreds/thousands of data centers(each central office was a data center) as such ipv6... Still had some legacy tools that relied on ipv4, but ipv6 was basically the only way to fix some of their issues with data normalization in their IPAM etc. Also, having to provision and manage these servers with people and flash drives and keyboards and bios settings was suboptimal. Insert multiple racks ... hundreds of them inside the same data center, multiple vlan's(reasons) some good ... some not ... l2 at that scale had issues. Wanted to just turn them on with a firmware/boot agent that would connect to a provisioning server and download their OS and bios settings. as such we built something that was basically the replacement for an iDRAC/ILO :) and ran on actual factual ipv6 first. some nic's still let you burn into the ROM your own boot loader... can't say more for NDA reasons though I doubt anyone is using this as the whole product got subsumed by the public cloud push.
- theK 3mo agoCool project! I had mistral vibecode me something similar (split into two services and run via docker compose) just a few weeks ago! I still have dome nitpicks with the result, maybe I'll switch my stack over to your solution!
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- pwndByDeath 3mo agoPXE is one of those easy to take for granted without appreciation for how much of a PIA it is to get working sometimes. I run a homelab PXE & NFSboot, so no hard drives in the homelab. Works great until I do something to bork it up. I have been fine tuning setup scripts to automatically get things going for scratch, but I always find there was one more hack I didn't automate last time. iPXE is on my to-learn list.
- betaporter 3mo agoHas anyone else noticed how readily identifiable AI generated text is? This is a very cool project, and I suppose it's hard to know for sure, but everything about the site describing the project "feels" AI generated to me. I do not say this to detract from the value of the project or its very interesting nature, by the way. Just an orthogonal observation.
- 3form 3mo agoDefinitely AI generated. But the project is interesting, because that space felt a bit dry to me. netboot.xyz and iventoy are cool, but for most basic use cases I always felt these things could be yet further simplified. So I guess I'll go and review the code when I find some time. EDIT: Found the disclosure in the repo: >I've used Claude CLI to help with some parts of this project - mostly making the web UI pretty, as I'm NOT a frontend developer. I also used it to generate the docs, but I review them manually - no automatically-generated AI code goes into the project without review from myself. I guess that's fair.
- sscaryterry 3mo agoYep, not everyone takes AI's output, and uses it verbatim. Sometimes it feels like everyone gets painted with the same brush.
- 3form 3mo agoYes, that's why I think responsible people should truthfully disclose.
- sscaryterry 3mo agoSince when is disclosure a "should"? Nobody asks if you were stark-naked whilst coding it, high on drugs, having a bad day or any other arbitrary question. Disclosure is something the author volunteered, its his freedom to do with HIS creation as he wishes. Get off your soapbox.
- LetMeLogin 3mo agoThere's also https://netboot.xyz https://netboot.xyz which is quite cool too.
- tyrellj 3mo agoYeah, this project incorporates netboot.xyz apparently
- iwontberude 3mo agoIt’s so sketch… anyone who trusts NetBoot.xyz is asking to be pwned. You need to serve your own iPXE files and cached ISOs.
- e12e 3mo ago... Via netboot.xyz? https://netboot.xyz/docs/selfhosting/ https://netboot.xyz/docs/selfhosting/
- iwontberude 3mo agoNews to me, this seems reasonable
- garybuk 3mo agoAuthor of Bootimus here - I built this because I don't have time to ass about with Ansible. it's a horrible UX.
- gsliepen 3mo agoNice, although if you already are running your own DHCP and web server, it's very easy to add a TFTP server and configure everything to serve whatever you want. So it does feel a bit like reinventing the wheel to me. A PXE boot server has many uses. The project already mentions using it for tools like GParted, Memtest86+ and so on. Booting live OS or OS installers via netboot.xyz is also great. But you can automate things even further; at a previous job (~18 years ago) I used PXE to serve a debian installer image with a preseed file to add user accounts with SSH keys, apt install all the dependencies, and install local binaries to get machines up and running useful stuff without needing to do any manual configuration. Nowadays you'd probably just have it do a minimal install + add just an SSH key, and then let another tool like Ansible take over the rest of the provisioning.
- nullify88 3mo agoAlternatives to Ansible could be Nix / nixos, or bootc.
- bityard 3mo ago> it's very easy to add a TFTP server and configure everything to serve whatever you want. In your own homelab or in a small company, sure. But the nice thing about proxyDHCP is that in a larger company, if the network engineering team hands you a subnet to play in that has DHCP forwarding configured in the router already, and you want to do PXE in it, you can just deploy your own proxyDHCP server without any extra red tape. Or in my case, I just don't like to have configuration for a single service scattered around my network devices if I can avoid it.
- Zopieux 3mo agoPerformative UI unnecessary green status dot: check! Slop websites are getting very old very fast. https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/status-dot https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/status-...
- srcreigh 3mo agoLast year I released my version of this: https://pxehost.com https://pxehost.com Pxehost is much less featureful than Bootimus, no dashboard, and only supports netboot.xyz. I am curious how Bootimus got udp broadcast to work via Docker on arm macOS. I could not figure that out and it’s why I released pxehost as a cross platform binary. We need a good ISO to set up new hosts to run firecracker VMs in k3s. That would be a killer homelab tool. Tooling to make custom ISOs. And some Kairos/Talos immutable image update style tooling would be great too. The dream is to boot via PXE once per host to setup secure k8s nodes, using just Ethernet cord, ISP router, and a windows laptop or an iPhone.
- iwontberude 3mo agoNetBoot.xyz is one of the most sketch projects on the internet, yeah nope nope nope.
- e12e 3mo agoEven if self hosted? https://netboot.xyz/docs/selfhosting/ https://netboot.xyz/docs/selfhosting/
- iwontberude 3mo agoThat’s fine I guess
- als0 3mo agoWhat is sketchy about it? I think you know something the rest of us don't.
- iwontberude 3mo agoI didn’t realize people were talking about self hosted. For public NetBoot.xyz: Even if they deliver isos matching publicly available checksums, you can’t trust they won’t inject kernel parameters unwittingly. If I was a cyber criminal I would find NetBoot.xyz a fine place to build out a bot net.
- WhyNotHugo 3mo agoCurious why they'd go for DHCP instead of DHCPv6 for something new in 2026. Is there firmware around that still doesn't support IPv6, or is it simply that PXE over IPV6 isn't that common in general?
- theandrewbailey 3mo agoI PXE boot random old consumer grade laptops and desktops at work constantly (refurb department at an ewaste recycling company). PXE over IPv6 support is practically universal.
- garybuk 3mo agoIPV6 is retarded and no one uses it.