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Netboot.xyz: your favorite operating systems in one place

netboot.xyz

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Re: Netboot.xyz: your favorite operating systems in one place

#21

Post by School-Cotton »

MarkovChain242 wrote: post #2

This is sort-of cool, I guess, but also very much not what you would want to do? I mean, people agitate against `curl blah.xyz | sh` for a reason. And this, by any measure, is much worse. Also: 'By default iPXE does not compile in HTTPS support'

> people agitate against `curl blah.xyz | sh` for a reason.

What’s the reason, exactly?

If you’re principled about only ever installing anything from vetted repos, then sure, your position is at least consistent. But my experience is that people who are appalled by pipe-to-sh are for whatever reason much less appalled by downloading random binaries or .deb files from blah.xyz and running them manually, which seems like just a more labor-intensive version of the same thing.

Re: Netboot.xyz: your favorite operating systems in one place

#22

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

MarkovChain242 wrote: post #2

This is sort-of cool, I guess, but also very much not what you would want to do? I mean, people agitate against `curl blah.xyz | sh` for a reason. And this, by any measure, is much worse. Also: 'By default iPXE does not compile in HTTPS support'

Cloud services do this to provision hypervisors and other infrastructure, the vms effectively do similar post boot. If you architect your management network well transport security should not be an issue.

The ‘piping curl into bash is dangerous’ meme is silly unless you’re actively reviewing shell scripts prior to execution. It’s no different to a git clone, pip install or npm update.

Re: Netboot.xyz: your favorite operating systems in one place

#23

Post by snvzz »

MarkovChain242 wrote: post #2

This is sort-of cool, I guess, but also very much not what you would want to do? I mean, people agitate against `curl blah.xyz | sh` for a reason. And this, by any measure, is much worse. Also: 'By default iPXE does not compile in HTTPS support'

netboot xyz does signature checking.

Re: Netboot.xyz: your favorite operating systems in one place

#24

Post by snvzz »

rwmj wrote: post #10
abeyer wrote: post #6

Am I missing something or is there no documentation about what their distro/hardware support matrix looks like? Do I have to just boot into it and navigate the menus to figure that out?

https://netboot.xyz/docs/faq#what-operating-systems-are-curr... However they don't list the versions of each OS. As for hardware support, I guess it's i686/x86-64 only?

Bottom of the linked page.

https://netboot.xyz/docs/#supported-architectures

Re: Netboot.xyz: your favorite operating systems in one place

#25

Post by coredog64 »

jonathantf2 wrote: post #13
RulerOf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered for some time why none of the major OEMs have built this. Surely if I could embed an iPXE module into my board's BIOS with HTTPS support and a custom boot server that chainloads all of it logic from the internet, including a plethora of hardware support tools. They could even tie the availability of premium internet-booted tools to the service tag and get that sweet SaaS subscription money.

Dell machines do this, if you boot to SupportAssist you can wipe and reload the drive from the BIOS, it'll download Windows for you. It even lets you log into your Microsoft account to get your BitLocker recovery key and restore all your files from your dead partition.

I only know this because once every two weeks my corporate Dell laptop will BSOD, forget that it has a hard drive, and then continuously try to boot over HTTPS until I enter UEFI setup and fiddle with boot device order.

Re: Netboot.xyz: your favorite operating systems in one place

#26

Post by colechristensen »

PXE is one of those great old technologies which always excited me. I got the opportunity very early on to build an automated system to allow developers to install fresh operating systems to test on machines in the datacenter by filling out a web form which resulted in a hands-free install the next time they rebooted the target system.

I've wanted to replicate that kind of thing at home or work ever since but with cloud tech it's just not necessary (but I hear often done by the cloud providers themselves) and at home it doesn't quite solve any real-world problems.

Re: Netboot.xyz: your favorite operating systems in one place

#27

Post by hnlmorg »

dsr_ wrote: post #5
MarkovChain242 wrote: post #2

This is sort-of cool, I guess, but also very much not what you would want to do? I mean, people agitate against `curl blah.xyz | sh` for a reason. And this, by any measure, is much worse. Also: 'By default iPXE does not compile in HTTPS support'

That's why a serious user sets up their own server, serves the images that they have selected and checked, and doesn't serve outside of their known netspace.

I did that for a while but keeping images up to date was a chore I’d often forget to do then regret not doing once I needed it. Sure I could probably automate it with a little effort but instead I switched to this service and have been running with it for a few years now without any issues.

While I know there is a risk involved, pragmatically that risk is very low given I’m just an anonymous individual very occasionally using this for personal devices.

You can actually run this service locally though. I did contemplate running their Docker container on my home server. However I use it so infrequently that even running their Docker container locally felt like an unnecessary additional piece of work.

Re: Netboot.xyz: your favorite operating systems in one place

#28

Post by alfiedotwtf »

colechristensen wrote: post #26

PXE is one of those great old technologies which always excited me. I got the opportunity very early on to build an automated system to allow developers to install fresh operating systems to test on machines in the datacenter by filling out a web form which resulted in a hands-free install the next time they rebooted the target system. I've wanted to replicate that kind of thing at home or work ever since but with cl…

I had a cheap, slow, second hand laptop that I would power on only when needing to seed the PXE boots...

So when I wanted a clean slate, I would:

    - turn on laptop
    - reboot client machine
    - make a coffee (or two)
    - there is no step four.
It was wonderful and to be quite honest, I'm not sure why I stopped!

Re: Netboot.xyz: your favorite operating systems in one place

#29

Post by hnlmorg »

colechristensen wrote: post #26

PXE is one of those great old technologies which always excited me. I got the opportunity very early on to build an automated system to allow developers to install fresh operating systems to test on machines in the datacenter by filling out a web form which resulted in a hands-free install the next time they rebooted the target system. I've wanted to replicate that kind of thing at home or work ever since but with cl…

The real world home usage for me is being able to install Linux or BSD without needing to manually download and image and burn it to a USB drive (in fact the reason I set up PXE booting in the first place was because I kept losing USB drives and thus wouldn’t have anything to boot from).

Re: Netboot.xyz: your favorite operating systems in one place

#30

Post by mbreese »

latchkey wrote: post #15

This project looks neat. I boot well over 10,000 blade computers that don't have onboard storage, with iPXE. Kind of amazing technology. Had to develop our own super minimal Ubuntu distro though. Used a hacked up version of debirf to do it. Not sure this project offers what I need, which is a less hacked up version of debirf.

I didn’t use PXE to boot diskless machines, but I do find it great for remote maintenance. I’ve used it for rebuilding servers remotely from a boot image with only a very limited KVM. Serving boot media over PXE was a life saver. Honestly, I’ll be keeping a PXE server (with an HTTP server for images) on all my future clusters. It’s just that useful, especially for disaster recovery.
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