netboot.xyz on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Overview

netboot.xyz is an open source network boot toolkit. It pairs an iPXE bootloader with a curated, continuously maintained menu tree covering well over a hundred operating systems and utilities, so a machine anywhere on your network can power on and boot straight into a live desktop, a rescue shell, a disk utility or a full OS installer, entirely over the network and without anyone walking a USB stick to it. Point your DHCP server at the instance, boot a client, and the menu appears.

Running it yourself, rather than booting from the public netboot.xyz service, gives you three things: your machines boot from infrastructure you control, they keep working when the internet does not, and you can mirror the images you care about locally so that provisioning runs at local network speed instead of pulling gigabytes across the internet for every machine. A browser based admin interface lets you browse the menu tree, edit your own local menu overrides and download images into the local mirror. It suits anyone who provisions bare metal or virtual machines at any scale: system administrators building a lab, technicians who need a rescue and diagnostics environment always on tap, and teams who want repeatable network installs instead of hand carried media.

Common uses

• A private network boot server for provisioning bare metal and virtual machines
• An always available rescue, diagnostics and disk utility environment
• A local mirror of installer images so provisioning runs at network speed

See it running

Real screenshots taken while testing this image against its deployment guide.