[unqueued]

I actually have something I've been meaning to put on github. I wrote it over a decade ago and I need to dockerize it. I only made it in Vagrant.

But it can do something iVentoy can not.

https://www.iventoy.com/en/faq.html:

   The computer which run iVentoy must be in the same LAN with them.
   Besides, there must no other DHCP servers in the same LAN.

It can coexist with an existing DHCP server. That means you can just start it up on your own network without any modifications, and start netbooting machines.

It turns out that multiple DHCP servers can co-exist on the same network segment. So I just have a second dhcp server solely for a pxe bootstrapper. At the time, at least the initial download must be tftp, but I used a stripped down ipxe stub that took advantage of the universal undi network drivers, and then loaded the rest (usually syslinux) over a fast HTTPS connection.

From there, iSCSI was no problem, and I could also use tools like plop, memdisk, or grub4dos, as well as Windows 7/8/10 with wimboot.

I remember for some distros like Knoppix, we would use an NBI driver to just mount the iso directly over the network, which could be far simpler and more performant than NFS.

EDIT: To be honest, it is simple enough that it doesn't have to use Docker. It is mostly dnsmasq and PHP.

[aaviator42]

That seems incredibly cool and I'd love to be able to play with and use it! Definitely doesn't sound like something that requires docker.

Plus I always have a soft spot for cool tools written in PHP :)

[jaclaz]

I think that it is possible to use another DHCP server with iVentoy, but it must support some features (next-server and bootfile):

https://www.iventoy.com/en/doc_ext_dhcp.html

and likely it won't work with any DHCP server that has them, it seems like a possible option not recommended by the Author, probably experimental.

[vxNsr]

hey, this is definitely something I'd be interested, if you do end up sharing it please let me know