4 posts tagged with "netboot.xyz"

It has been a while since an update, but the main netboot.xyz site has a new look to it. I switched from using Hugo to using Docusaurus. I also moved the blog from Ghost to simplify things. I started down this path a while back and recently got around to polishing it all up and pushing it out. I plan on building out more content and docs over time to make it a great resource for everything netboot related. At some point, I still would like to get some updated pictures, logos, etc as well but those are a much lower priority.

We have been hard at work the last few weeks and I wanted to provide some updates as to what we're currently working on and where we want to go.

I would like to thank all of the contributors over the last few years that have contributed code, tested, and provided feedback for the project. The contributions have all been really helpful and have helped keep the project up to date.

There are a number of distributions out there that provide proper support for booting the distribution over the network. A lot of the more popular distributions usually provide a installer kernels that can be easily downloaded for use. You point at the vmlinuz and the initrd and can them immediately proceed with the install streaming down packages as needed. These distributions make it great for tools like netboot.xyz to install using iPXE.

There are some distributions out there that don't have this functionality and typically only produce the ISO without any repositories that provide installer kernels or the rootfs.

In those cases, occasionally you can use memdisk and iPXE to boot those ISOs but they don't always work. In doing some research, I ran across one of the major issues as to why.

My newest project on the side is netboot.xyz. If you've seen boot.rackspace.com, this should look pretty familiar to you. I ran across cheap .xyz domains from Namecheap (one dollar at the time!), and figured the netboot.xyz name space was much easier to remember and was more neutral to the goal I was trying to accomplish. I forked boot.rackspace.com (still doing basic maintenance) and am now focusing my efforts on netboot.xyz.