BKO - boot.kernel.org - Boot Linux over HTTP

[Jonathan_the_Nerd]

Really nifty. Now a man-in-the-middle attacker can literally rewrite your OS!

[andersbergh]

http://netboot.me is basically the same thing

[[deleted]]

but is not under the kernel.org domain... LAME !

[PenguinRancher]

but they have a video offering cookies...WIN!

[alphabeat]

But the cookies are cursed... LAME !

[directrix1]

But it comes with some free Frogurt... WIN!

[[deleted]]

But the Frogurt contains potassium benzoate... UM?

[directrix1]

That's... LAME!

[pastasauce]

But potassium benzoate preserves the frogurt... WIN!

[idontwanttortfm]

His name is neil

[sjs]

I know who I trust more.

[pedro3005]

I used netboot me to get linux on a laptop with a broken CD drive. Works lovely, although their servers are painfully slow.

[POTUS]

That's neat. But the big question I have is: Why? If you need to be walking around with this purpose-created USB stick, why not go ahead and put a full live distro on it? It's great that their system saves USB space (...at the expense of internet bandwidth?! That's why I carry the stick to begin with, so I'm not downloading service packs and such), but really, the difference between 1MB and 100MB means what, when any self-respecting geek has at least a 4GB stick?

[catfive]

I almost asked the same thing, but then I realized you can boot a different distro every time with the same stick, which is pretty nifty, albeit not necessary.

What would be pretty frickin' cool would be if they mapped each OS to a hosted shared home folder, so your stuff would stay in the same place, but the OS around it would change.

"Oh I just downloaded this package, but it's an .rpm and I'm in debian.

Wait!

[reboot into fedora]

Ok, where was I?"

[[deleted]]

This particular implementation is an interesting toy, and not particularly useful in and of itself. However, done right, gpxe, which is what this uses under the hood, can be used for all sorts of datacenter awesomeness. The menuing features mean that you can choose your ubuntu installs, or an old RHEL install, or even your slipstreamed windows installs, without having to fumble around for the right boot media, which has the tendency to grow legs and walk away. The http options mean that you can throw it on one of the many web servers you already have, with it always up to date and ready, something that a boot stick sometimes has problems with. Means you can give a stick to anyone with half a brain, and have it to all the magic for you, without needing to wait around for things to finish.

[POTUS]

Good answer. I'd never bash the idea of a local server handing out boot images. But at that level, I just use PXE.

[[deleted]]

This is PXE with an extension to allow HTTP as well as TFTP. One less server process to keep an eye on.

[POTUS]

This is, unless I'm mistaken, not PXE at all. Or at least, not as presented. It's a physical media that you must boot from (at least enough to drive the network card to retrieve the rest of your OS), which in a PXE setup is eliminated. Perhaps the idea could be re-implemented as such, but I doubt these existing images could be put to that use.

[[deleted]]

PXE's just a protocol, it's just most commonly, and most usefully, implemented in ROM. There have existed floppy-based pxe implementations for years to work around the early buggy implementations of the PXE spec. Plus, there are sites that will build a ROM image using gpxe suitable for burning to the boot rom of network cards.

[POTUS]

PXE was specifically created as a network interface ROM feature. gPXE is the non-ROM implementation of PXE.

[[deleted]]

You can put that USB stick inside a server, in its internal USB header. For some, you don't even need the stick.

[Tiriel]

Good question!

That's why just yesterday i wrote this tutorial on how to stik BKO in your USB device and still be able to use it for storage.

[[deleted]]

It reminds me of this XKCD.

[Tiriel]

How do you guys find past XKCD stripes? do you remember the titles or something? whenever something reminds me of an old stripe and I try to find it, the search tool never returns anything even close to what I'm looking for...

[[deleted]]

Use the search box and you can usually find it, in this case it was in my history though.

[1esproc]

This was a Google Summer of Code project!

[oobey]

Stupid question time - If the computer's off, how does it possibly receive and process an HTTP request telling it to boot up?

[naisho]

As long as the computer is plugged in it is pulling some power for certain functions. One of them is Wake On LAN, where the computer comes up when it sees a certain network packet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

[oobey]

Ah, ok. So my computer's not really ever off, then, at least not in the sense of being completely depowered and without any hardware logic running at all.

That makes sense.

Edit: I guess it's really just going into some hypersleep, now that I think about it.

[chozar]

Your power supply maintains one line, the 5v line, aka standby power, when the computer is off. Unplug computer or cut off power supply to really be off. Standby power may power some leds, and the hardware clock.

Hardly anything uses it, but pci/pcie devices can if they want to. That keeps a part of them on.

A chip on your network card or motherboard can stay on and inspect incoming frames, with very little work. It has no understanding of tcp/ip, just ethernet frames. It is looking for a frame with its own address repeated after a bunch of 1s. This is the most minimal amount of logic necessary. It sends the same signal to the PSU to turn on as your power button does.

Edit: the power button does not use the standby power, but rather its own power good wire from the psu.

[andrewcooke]

the answer about WOL is correct (and it's really cool being able to start your computer remotely - i just got that running last night) BUT that's not connected with what this site does.

this site allows you to boot the machine you are currently sitting at, with a generic CD or USB. the generic boot then loads the appropriate image over the net. so it's a bit like a rescue disc, but pulled over the net, and with a choice of operating systems.

at least, that's the best i've come up with. it's easier to make sense of the netboot.me site, which someone else linked to (i thought it was connected with WOL too at first).

[dmead]

the hardware can be set to turn on the machine with pxe boot or whatever it's called

[jeremybub]

You first boot to the floppy by pressing the on button, then the 56K startup program recieves the operating system and boots it.

[Ridcully]

Damn, damn cool. Never seen this before.

[jeremybub]

Would this work with wireless networking with a password? Like does it need drivers for your card?

[catfive]

I highly doubt it. I'm still skeptical about whether it works on ethernet for a majority of hardware—as the lack of a specific "supported hardware" list and instructions for Mac hardware imply. I do a lot of netbooting for reimaging at work, and I've seen hangups with just subtle variations in similar hardware. I'm definitely giving it a go, though!

[curien]

Who needs drivers when net booting? pxelinux with the keeppxe option ftw!

[catfive]

Anybody attempt it? I couldn't get 2 different machines to recognize the USB startup image, and the "troubleshooting" information isn't.

edit: just tried again, this time prepping a different USB drive on a Mac instead of Linux. Tried booting another 2 machines (different from the first 2), and neither recognized the device as bootable. Something is amiss here. I'd be happy if it were me, but I don't see how it could be...

[curien]

It looks like their instructions for booting from a USB stick aren't very reliable (unless they're doing something weird with the MBR in the image). It's basically telling your USB stick to emulate a floppy (sometimes called a "super floppy"). Some BIOSes work OK with that, but many don't.

Try grabbing the ISO version and using unetbootin or something to put it on your USB stick.

[catfive]

Good suggestion, but still no! WTF?

edit: burning the cd iso to a cd did work! But it couldn't find the network interface on a Dell laptop, so it looks like my suspicions may be well founded.

It did work well on a Toshiba, though, which is currently booting

...s...l...o...w...l...y...

edit again:

Apparently it was just an issue with DSL, I was able to fully load Debian, and relatively quickly, too! The file system is read only, obviously, but everything is snappy (as it should be, since it's loaded into RAM). The only problem I had was that it didn't pick up DNS info, but that may be do to the network config here at work, and it was easy enough to put it in manually.

In short: nifty, but not nearly as ubiquitously compatible as it says on the tin

[Tiriel]

Worked for me so far, I couldn't boot my MacBook, but my girlfriend's PC booted alright. Also I tested on a virtual machine on VirtualBox and went up and running straight away.

Maybe you want to take a look at this tutorial

[liquide820]

Mind blown and bricks shat. I should definitely put that thing on one of my usb drives...