Has anyone else noticed how readily identifiable AI generated text is? This is a very cool project, and I suppose it's hard to know for sure, but everything about the site describing the project "feels" AI generated to me.
I do not say this to detract from the value of the project or its very interesting nature, by the way. Just an orthogonal observation.
There is a note on there around AI coding which gives a little more hope. But what i would expect from such a component is also a clear indication of how its security is being vetter, tested and attempted to be assured.
When using such a server, its of critical importance its secure. If someone can enter it, they can change your images, knock over a machine and get it to boot a rogue image etc.
Id be interested what thread models are taken into account. If there is any fuzzing.
Perhaps a clear list of all the third party packages it pulls in and assessment of those packages.
It sounds like a lot but actually AI can help set up a lot of tooling around this stuff to make it more managable to do a lot of thorough testing / vetting of things.
I do think its also interesting project, and ofc it might be somehting that matures over time in this regard. (i am super biassed about security also as its my domain and i've litterally seen colleagues root servers which hosted images for entire infras of companies. thats a scary vector. if you can tamper with 1 PXE boot you can overwrite firmware.
(this is not saying anything about secure boot ofc, my experiences with PXE predate that being actively deployed)
Definitely AI generated. But the project is interesting, because that space felt a bit dry to me. netboot.xyz and iventoy are cool, but for most basic use cases I always felt these things could be yet further simplified. So I guess I'll go and review the code when I find some time.
EDIT:
Found the disclosure in the repo:
>I've used Claude CLI to help with some parts of this project - mostly making the web UI pretty, as I'm NOT a frontend developer. I also used it to generate the docs, but I review them manually - no automatically-generated AI code goes into the project without review from myself.
PXE is one of those easy to take for granted without appreciation for how much of a PIA it is to get working sometimes.
I run a homelab PXE & NFSboot, so no hard drives in the homelab. Works great until I do something to bork it up.
I have been fine tuning setup scripts to automatically get things going for scratch, but I always find there was one more hack I didn't automate last time.
Cool project! I had mistral vibecode me something similar (split into two services and run via docker compose) just a few weeks ago! I still have dome nitpicks with the result, maybe I'll switch my stack over to your solution!
Has anyone else noticed how readily identifiable AI generated text is? This is a very cool project, and I suppose it's hard to know for sure, but everything about the site describing the project "feels" AI generated to me.
I do not say this to detract from the value of the project or its very interesting nature, by the way. Just an orthogonal observation.
There is a note on there around AI coding which gives a little more hope. But what i would expect from such a component is also a clear indication of how its security is being vetter, tested and attempted to be assured.
When using such a server, its of critical importance its secure. If someone can enter it, they can change your images, knock over a machine and get it to boot a rogue image etc.
Id be interested what thread models are taken into account. If there is any fuzzing.
Perhaps a clear list of all the third party packages it pulls in and assessment of those packages.
It sounds like a lot but actually AI can help set up a lot of tooling around this stuff to make it more managable to do a lot of thorough testing / vetting of things.
I do think its also interesting project, and ofc it might be somehting that matures over time in this regard. (i am super biassed about security also as its my domain and i've litterally seen colleagues root servers which hosted images for entire infras of companies. thats a scary vector. if you can tamper with 1 PXE boot you can overwrite firmware.
(this is not saying anything about secure boot ofc, my experiences with PXE predate that being actively deployed)
Definitely AI generated. But the project is interesting, because that space felt a bit dry to me. netboot.xyz and iventoy are cool, but for most basic use cases I always felt these things could be yet further simplified. So I guess I'll go and review the code when I find some time.
EDIT: Found the disclosure in the repo: >I've used Claude CLI to help with some parts of this project - mostly making the web UI pretty, as I'm NOT a frontend developer. I also used it to generate the docs, but I review them manually - no automatically-generated AI code goes into the project without review from myself.
I guess that's fair.
Yes, this observation has been expressed like a million times here.
It's the staccato sentences
PXE is one of those easy to take for granted without appreciation for how much of a PIA it is to get working sometimes.
I run a homelab PXE & NFSboot, so no hard drives in the homelab. Works great until I do something to bork it up.
I have been fine tuning setup scripts to automatically get things going for scratch, but I always find there was one more hack I didn't automate last time.
iPXE is on my to-learn list.
Cool project! I had mistral vibecode me something similar (split into two services and run via docker compose) just a few weeks ago! I still have dome nitpicks with the result, maybe I'll switch my stack over to your solution!
Made something similar at work a bunch of years back…. :) good to see people still thinking of this stuff and making modern versions
That being said what may be more useful is a EFI binary you can push to a motherboard that does this with a tpm key
Some projects have been around for over a decade =3
https://fogproject.org/download.php
https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject
Yeah all of these rely on layer 2 or dhcp relay and are really ipv4 only solutions.
Not to discount what the fog guys had… love what they made :)
Look at ironic for something better.
What we eventually ended up with after a couple of iterations was decidedly better for our use case :)
But sadly doesn’t exist in the outside world yet :(.
https://github.com/danderson/netboot/tree/main/pixiecore