XOXorNot·Jun 20, 2026
In Bootimus – A Self-Contained PXE and HTTP Boot Serverdanderson
netboot
Go2019–2026
danderson / netboot
netboot
Packages and utilities for network booting
4Distinct people
4Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
1.6KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Packages and utilities for network booting
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
I highly recommend using pixiecore as an iPXE server -- your remote machines only need to have PXE enabled. Previously, it was a pain in the ass to install the TFTP server and…
ryanmjacobs used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-06-20 19:38:30 UTC to 2026-06-20 14:33:50 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sources> It would be nice to have a lot more detail
I'm going to save this for when I'm asked to cut the three paras on power circuit types.
Re: standardising layout at the rack level; we do now! we only figured this out after site #2. It makes everything so much easier to verify. And yeah, validation is hard - manually doing it thus far; want to play around with scraping LLDP data but our switch software stack has a bug :/. It's an evolving process, the more we work with different contractors, the more edge cases we unearth and account for. The biggest improvement is that we have built a internal DCIM that templates a rack design and exports a interactive "cabling explorer" for the site techs - including detailed annotated diagrams of equipment showing port names, etc... The screenshot of the elevation is a screenshot of part of that tool.
> Wh
Read the rest
at does your metal->boot stack look like?
We've hacked together something on top of https://github.com/danderson/netboot/tree/main/pixiecore that serves a debian netboot + preseed file. We have some custom temporal workers to connect to Redfish APIs on the BMCs to puppeteer the contraption. Then a custom host agent to provision QEMU VMs and advertise assigned IPs via BGP (using FRR) from the host.
Re: new DCs for failure scenarios, yeah we've already blown breakers etc... testing stuff (that's how we figured out our phase balancing was off). Went in with a thermal camera on another. A site in AMS is coming up next week and the goal for that is to see how far we can push a fully loaded switch fabric.
There's also pixiecore [0] with a similar idea but with pxe instead of usb.
[0]: https://github.com/danderson/netboot/tree/master/pixiecore
In ReactOSI highly recommend using pixiecore as an iPXE server -- your remote machines only need to have PXE enabled. Previously, it was a pain in the ass to install the TFTP server and get a DHCP server capable of not binding to every request (and only PXE requests like the standard allows). pixiecore does everything for you in like 10 seconds: https://github.com/danderson/netboot/tree/master/pixiecore. We're using it on-premise to spin up a server rack into stateless Kubernetes nodes. None of the blades have a hard-drive/ssd :)
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