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Comment by nyanpasu64 | Hacker News Reader

I tried netboot once, and lost interest when it took minutes to download an ISO over cable internet (DSL would be even worse) every singe time I tried booting into a live distro while debugging things. It's faster to download the ISOs I need ahead of time, save them on a Ventoy drive, and boot (and reboot) into each one in seconds.

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I’ve found it to be much faster and far more convenient than downloading the image I want and writing it to a usb drive.

I did at one point keep a few stock images on my tftp server but even there, they would go out of date quicker than my need to use them. So I ended up sticking with NetBoot.xyz for convenience

netboot.xyz allows you to preload the isos you want to boot :)

How do I preload or cache ISOs on a flash drive holding the netboot.xyz client? I haven't seen any mention of it in docs. I've seen some people talking about setting up local iPXE servers, but I don't know if my machines always have functional networking to my server laptop during startup (and this fails outside my home network).

Netboot.xyz allows you to self-host an instance of it, which can cache ISOs. I was doing it for a time, and thought it neat, but not worth the hassle to keep running.

Sounds like they compliment each other. Save your most common boot images to ventoy, including netboot. Load netboot when you’d like to experiment.

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