Bootimus – A Self-Contained PXE and HTTP Boot Server

Last year I released my version of this: 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.

Nice, 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.

Has 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.

There's also https://netboot.xyz which is quite cool too.

Cool 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!

Made 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

PXE 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.

Performative UI unnecessary green status dot: check!

Slop websites are getting very old very fast.

https://vorpus.github.io/performativeUI/#/components/status-...