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Comment by gosub100 | Hacker News Reader

I've never tried ventoy, but if the PXE/netboot features work, I want to strongly urge anyone thinking of experimenting with PXE/netboot to use ventoy or any other similar helper instead of trying to set up PXE/netboot yourself. I can confidently say that PXE was the single most difficult project/aspect of computing I've ever worked on in the 20 years of working with Linux machines as a hobby and a job. 3-4 times I attempted to mess with it, got it working about 2. Wasted/spent an absolutely enormous amount of time.

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PXE is one of those things that used to be dead simple to set up. Just add an entry to the DHCP record and set up a TFTP server for the kernel and NFS root drive and you were golden.

UEFI threw a huge moneywrench in the process, and SystemD doesn't help. Last time I made it work I had to track down a mailing list entry where someone discussed an otherwise undocumented kernel option that needed to be set to make it work. One of the key glue techs that made it work last time (rom-o-matic) went out of development and is gone.

That is still basically the process. You need to ensure that the arch options are being selected properly in your dhcp file, ex:

if option arch = 00:07 { filename "uefi/shimx64.efi"; next-server X.X.X.X; } else ...

Otherwise, your going to get the wrong arch/filename.

It is similar to HTTPS, but the arch = 00:10 for x64 and it needs:

option vendor-class-identifier "HTTPClient";

Then put the URL in the filename field.

Finally just put the usual bios/pxe stub in the last "else"

Of course, your distro should provide a PXE capable grub/kernel/initrd, which you then toss on the TFTP/HTTPS (or HTTP then you don't have to deal with certs) server in the path provided.

UEFI seems hard, because there's no standardized way to boot ISO files, and memdisk from syslinux doesn't work in UEFI. With memdisk, the OS kernel could (if properly written) hook into the loaded image, and mount that as well.

Without that support, you have to take apart ISO files to netboot them, and your PXE environment needs to understand the various kernels and how to boot them, and how to provide modules / filesystem images.

It's a big pain.

Either Dell or Lenovo (can't remember which, I own both laptops) has some new-generation HTTPS boot, tried it (I wanted to dual boot FreeBSD/Linux without messing with UEFI, disabling secure boot, or repartitioning, just pressing F12 and net-booting), wasted another 2-3 hours rebooting each time, got absolutely nowhere again. Man, this stuff is cursed.

Just commenting an adjacent UEFI problem solved: My workaround at work with some old test robots that I still use, but don't have UEFI... Put iPXE on a flash drive, and use that to chain-boot into the uefi-only PXE setup. (there's still a few that this doesn't work for, but it's a minority and I'm going to scrap those...)

iPXE makes the client-side part of it manageable; the only drawback is having to walk through the open pull-requests on github for the patches you need to get it working, and possibly having to fight some buggy uefi drivers (usually solved with snponly). Also has the advantage of making it possible to do everything secureboot + over TLS with your own certificates, rather than classical PXE which is all plaintext.

For the serverside, there are several python projects on github which provide everything you need in one package, for example pybootd.

You are not wrong.

But I get a good bit of satisfaction of having gleaned a pretty functional understanding of setting up PXE/netboot (Ubuntu installs; with a Ubuntu PXE server via DNSMasq + nfs + tftp).

I even did some grub menu user input (and ascii art while I was at it) prompts/trickery to allow choosing the machine name shortly after boot, before the long slow Ubuntu install.

The list of things I've failed at (memtest) or not tried (Windows) is surely long, though.

Ventoy is fantastic for any lower-volume imaging needs I have, of course.

I tried iVnetoy on both Windows and Linux, on Windows I couldn't get it working (don't know why, maybe a firewall issue?), but on Linux it worked flawlessly, and the injection features are also great

Ventoy and iVentoy are separate products. I have not tried iVentoy -- I have no real need for it -- but I can attest to the USB-key tool's simplicity and utility. I suspect the netboot one will be comparably good.

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