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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

I personally wouldn’t recommend ISOs for PXE booting longer. It requires loading the entire disc into memory first which is going to be slower than purpose built netboot images.

These days I tend to just run a local mirror of NetBoot.xyz for personal use. Not needed to use PXE booting professionally for around 10 years but I’m sure others out there might still be using it.

I do agree with you that universally retiring ISO is a bit dramatic. However I do think their usefulness is greatly diminished these days.

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> It requires loading the entire disc into memory first which is going to be slower than purpose built netboot images.

I'm not sure it does require loading the entire image. Servers (Dell/HP) that allow remote mounting iso images will use HTTP-Range requests to be able to 'seek' the disk. I _thought_ (but honestly don't remember) iPXE was capable of range requests too.

In fairness, last time I used ISO with PXE was on BIOS systems. More recent iPXE kernels (if that’s even the right word) might support seek.

I wouldn’t use PXE at all! But I’ve been out of the computer imaging business for a long time, now. The folks that do that where I work simply activate Windows with Intune on first boot from the manufacturer, similar to how Macs are activated.

PXE is still useful when you want to setup ~200 servers which are freshly installed in your racks and they have no OS on board, or when they need to be reinstalled in ~10 minutes, so you can revive another cattle in short order.

In my former industry, and my former line of work, we would never trust the integrity of an OS image on an SSD delivered from the manufacturer by standard courier (not e2e receipted CoC) without some means of verifying it on the receiving end e.g. checksum. Easy to do with network hardware, harder with PCs. Much simpler to just PXE-blast all the devices when they arrive.

It's quite a different world with Windows Autopilot pre-provisioning from the OEM. These images are customized to your specs, there's no Candy Crush shipping on pre-provisioned devices.

Windows Autopilot uses a PXE boot, where appropriate.

But how do you get Windows installed on the computer, for example if the disk is replaced?

Back to the manufacture it goes! Not a big deal in a medium to large business. I'm unsure how a small business would deal with it, but the smaller you go, the less likely you'd have a standardized image.

I think you probably skimmed my comment because I said personal use.

Having PXE has been helpful getting Linux on newer laptops. Saves messing around with usb sticks.

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