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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

#41

Post by linsomniac »

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.

There used to be a tool called, IIRC, "firebreather" that was a multicast image broadcaster for booting clusters of systems. I did a search and couldn't find any reference to it now. An associate used it to boot hundreds or thousands of systems back in the early 2000s, it would take a minute or two.

Basically: The systems would PXE boot the bootloader (or maybe it was burned locally to the boot ROM or similar, I don't recall). Then firebreather would spray the kernels and associated boot data over multicast to all the machines at once. Any that were lagging behind or missed packets, would catch them the next time around, firebreather would spray the images a few times or something.

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

#42

Post by kayson »

mtlynch wrote: post #35

I was looking into netboot.xyz recently, as I do Raspberry Pi development. I'd love to be able to just run a VM that lets me load a few different Raspberry Pi OS images and choose which one I want the Pi to boot into on next reboot. netboot.xyz seemed promising, but I couldn't figure out how to use it. The docs don't explain much.[0] I tried running the Docker container and couldn't figure out what to do with it. I d…

I found to be helpful specifically for Netboot https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2019-12-16-netboot-xyz-docke...

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

#43

Post by latchkey »

generalizations wrote: post #33
latchkey wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Ubuntu? Mostly because it just makes packaging and compatibility easier. There is a plugin system which creates tarballs out of overlays... so you can add additional software into the system and the building of the tarballs can include things like apt install. These tarballs get downloaded and installed early on by a hacked init script. This way, we can do things like install minimized downloads of GPU drivers. T…

My side project for the last while was pretty similar to what you're describing, and as a result I've become very familiar with this "esoteric stuff". If you're hiring, I'm interested :)

Thanks. Emailed you.

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

#44

Post by latchkey »

linsomniac wrote: post #41
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.

There used to be a tool called, IIRC, "firebreather" that was a multicast image broadcaster for booting clusters of systems. I did a search and couldn't find any reference to it now. An associate used it to boot hundreds or thousands of systems back in the early 2000s, it would take a minute or two. Basically: The systems would PXE boot the bootloader (or maybe it was burned locally to the boot ROM or similar, I don'…

That's really cool. Luckily, our datacenters where these machines are all Tier 3, so the full reboot doesn't happen very often. We've only had to shut down a lot of racks once for some power management issues. It was a bit of a struggle, but things eventually booted.

The bigger issue that we faced was that dnsmasq couldn't keep up with all the UDP packets and we had to switch to Kea kind of mid-flight, which was a bit of work since it was a weekend (of course things fail on friday night) and restarting everything to get new leases (and a few with duplicate IPs) was a bit of nail biting. It all sorted itself out though and we haven't had any more issues on that front.

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

#46

Post by csdvrx »

tssva wrote: post #20
csdvrx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not bad, but with questionable choices making it not usable on a dedicated hard-drive partition: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/1342

"Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files." From the description of the project it doesn't seem running from a dedicated hard-drive partition is an actual goal of the project. I don't know that making choices which don't support a non-goal of a project are questionable. It works great for my use case of booting from a USB drive and I very much appreciate that it exis…

> From the description of the project it doesn't seem running from a dedicated hard-drive partition is an actual goal of the project

This "goal" would require a grand total of 2 changes.

> It works great for my use case of booting from a USB drive and I very much appreciate that it exists.

It's just like grubfm - a few files + a heuristic to use these with isos to make them bootable.

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

#47

Post by hnlmorg »

bravetraveler wrote: post #37
hnlmorg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 occasiona…

I've found it convenient (once setup...) to run internal package mirrors. These with even relatively dated 'netinstall' media can provide you with current installations. Then provide you with super fast updates. I'm more familiar with doing this with RPM based distributions -- CentOS, Fedora, etc. It's basically a web server and rsync behind a [parameterized] systemd timer so you can centrally control existing/new mi…

That was the issue for me though. It would often be years between usages since the only time I needed it was when a computer stopped booting or I was repurposing a device. Neither being things that happens very often.

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

#48

Post by jordanbeiber »

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’ve spent a lot of time doing that stuff at reasonable scale, now more than 20 years ago. Lot of fun!

When discovering gpxe/ipxe it got real interesting - now we could make web calls in pxe boot mode that let us automatically select os image based on asset tag from our cmdb. Role based app deployments to servers, and app streamed to clients. Those were the days… We built ci/cd not even knowing it was a thing.

When cloud started to be pushed I was like: “so pretty much what we’ve built here” (barring the promise of elastic scaling - we had barcodes preped from vendor batched to cmdb before delivery though). I wasn’t yet aware that most places didn’t use software to manage compute, end to end.

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

#49

Post by rwmj »

abeyer wrote: post #14
theantonym wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is ARM support as well in addition to i686/x86-64. Operating system versions are typically dropped as they go EOL upstream from the menu, we try and keep the menus up to date as changes and new versions are released.

~Given that it's already there (and presumably maintained) in the github readme, it might make sense to also provide this info on the docs site.~ Nevermind, I'd found the github link first, not sure how I missed it on the site. What's the state of arm64 booting like? Last I looked at early boot process on arm (which was admittedly a while ago) it was kind of a mess w/o a broadly adopted standard like uefi and every p…

Arm booting is unfortunately still a mess, but at least for server-class machines there's been some adoption of SBSA/SBBR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur...). Of course server-class machines are not the same as the cheap tat that everyone buys. You can install SBSA/SBBR-compliant firmware for your Raspberry Pi 4 (https://github.com/pftf) but it's not the default.

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

#50

Post by HeckFeck »

linsomniac wrote: post #41
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.

There used to be a tool called, IIRC, "firebreather" that was a multicast image broadcaster for booting clusters of systems. I did a search and couldn't find any reference to it now. An associate used it to boot hundreds or thousands of systems back in the early 2000s, it would take a minute or two. Basically: The systems would PXE boot the bootloader (or maybe it was burned locally to the boot ROM or similar, I don'…

That sounds a bit like UDP multicast. One of those tragically under used features of the networking stack. Ripe for abuse were it exposed on the open Internet certainly, but still very cool.
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