Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

  • Hacker News
  • Performative UI unnecessary green status dot: check!

    Slop websites are getting very old very fast.

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

  • Thanks, that was funny! It seems like more of an EyebrowPill.
  • Author of Bootimus here, for a internal facing admin panel, it would be great for you to show me some of your work so i can take inspiration - that being said, I'm a backend engineer not a frontend.
  • What does this have over netboot.xyz ??
  • Author 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.

  • 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

  • Some projects have been around for over a decade =3

    https://fogproject.org/

    https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject

  • 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.

  • Curious 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?

  • IPV6 is retarded and no one uses it.
  • I 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.
  • 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!
    by theK
  • There's also https://netboot.xyz which is quite cool too.
  • Yeah, this project incorporates netboot.xyz apparently
  • It’s so sketch… anyone who trusts NetBoot.xyz is asking to be pwned. You need to serve your own iPXE files and cached ISOs.
  • 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.

  • Alternatives to Ansible could be Nix / nixos, or bootc.
  • > 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.

  • 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.

  • NetBoot.xyz is one of the most sketch projects on the internet, yeah nope nope nope.
  • There used to be a Debian Live iso builder website for building custom Debian Live isos. It probably is discontinued, I can't seem to find it anymore.
  • > 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.

    Going by the Github, I'd be that it was Claude who figured it out. Which yeah, checks out.

  • 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.

  • Yes, this observation has been expressed like a million times here.
  • It's the staccato sentences
  • Author here, I did disclose website + frontend + docs are AI Generated - I see this as a fairly reasonable compromise as 1 person doing this with other jobs and projects. but hey can't please everyone feel free not to use it.
  • There is a note on there around AI coding which gives a little more hope. But what i would expect from such a component is also a clear indication of how its security is being vetter, tested and attempted to be assured.

    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)

  • Definitely 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.