Bootimus – A Self-Contained PXE and HTTP Boot Server(bootimus.com) |
Bootimus – A Self-Contained PXE and HTTP Boot Server(bootimus.com) |
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.
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.
When using such a server, its of critical importance its secure. If someone can enter it, they can change your images, knock over a machine and get it to boot a rogue image etc.
Id be interested what thread models are taken into account. If there is any fuzzing.
Perhaps a clear list of all the third party packages it pulls in and assessment of those packages.
It sounds like a lot but actually AI can help set up a lot of tooling around this stuff to make it more managable to do a lot of thorough testing / vetting of things.
I do think its also interesting project, and ofc it might be somehting that matures over time in this regard. (i am super biassed about security also as its my domain and i've litterally seen colleagues root servers which hosted images for entire infras of companies. thats a scary vector. if you can tamper with 1 PXE boot you can overwrite firmware.
(this is not saying anything about secure boot ofc, my experiences with PXE predate that being actively deployed)
What you are describing can happen with any tool, iVentoy literally injects code into your images without you knowing as it's closed source. NetbootXYZ have crazy CI Pipelines and ansible to make it work.
I tried to make it as single binary, open and single shot as possible.
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.
Going by the Github, I'd be that it was Claude who figured it out. Which yeah, checks out.
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.
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.
Is there firmware around that still doesn't support IPv6, or is it simply that PXE over IPV6 isn't that common in general?
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.
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
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 :(.
That being said, Bootimus can chainload to netboot.xyz if you so wish.
Slop websites are getting very old very fast.
https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/status-...
Explanation still required, therefore statement must concisely outline product. Feature retains attention.
Simple outtro. Attention retained.
It is not a bug, it is a feature.
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.
Disclosure is something the author volunteered, its his freedom to do with HIS creation as he wishes.
Get off your soapbox.