Network Boot to the Rescue, with UEFI and IPv6

tech.showmax.com

15 points·fanf2··7 comments

One point from me: UEFI 2.0+ can boot from server over WAN.

And if you are a lucky one with BIOS implementing the spec perfectly, it will pass on DHCP boot options on the command line to the kernel.

So yeah, you can boot over the internet these days!

You can pxe boot from the internet too, as long as you can control dhcp to send the next server, pxe is happy to tftp to that through the dhcp provided default route, and that should take you to the internet too (as long as any NAT there works fine for tftp)

In case of PXE, that's not given in 100%. Some IP stacks on option roms or bioses don't know of routing.

And EFI does HTTP(S), routing, DNS if the firmware is 100% standard compliant.

So far, it is the client command line that is bugged the most, so you can't reliably pass boot parameters to kernel

we use PXE in datacenter environment and in our Ceph based software defined storage solution called croit.io since years and we never ever had problems with that.

save yourself some lifetime and boot a pregenerated os over network, it's amazing

ctrl-f ssl

ctrl-f tls

ctrl-f vpn

ctrl-f secur

All zeroes.

From the article:

HTTPS boot exists, but has gained limited support so far. Due to the lack of support for HTTPS boot in the UEFI versions used, we do not use this feature at all.

Still no better than what you're implying :(

However, once you're in iPXE, that has features for downloading images over HTTPS: http://ipxe.org/crypto

(plus it's probably easier to upgrade than your motherboard's network boot implementation).

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