Network PXE Boot Platform

This platform provides a convenient way to PXE boot various operating system installers or live boot environments over the network, eliminating the need to download and create installation media. Created by Antony Messerli in 2014 and maintained by the community, the project has over 4,200 stars as of 2026 and serves millions of boot sessions annually. Key features include: iPXE-based booting (using iPXE open-source network boot firmware supporting HTTP, iSCSI, and Wi-Fi for enhanced PXE capabilities beyond traditional TFTP-only PXE), operating system installers (booting installers for Debian, Ubuntu, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Fedora, Arch Linux, openSUSE, NixOS, Kali Linux, and many other Linux distributions), live boot environments (booting live environments including System Rescue, Kali, GParted Live, Clonezilla, DBAN, Talos Linux, and memory testing tools), firmware updates (booting firmware update utilities including IPMI, Dell, HP, and Lenovo firmware tools), easy setup (pointing existing DHCP server to the iPXE binary or booting directly from USB, CD, or virtual media), self-hosting (deploying custom instances with iPXE binaries served from your own infrastructure using Docker), web-based management (customizing the boot menu and adding custom boot entries via a web interface), signed iPXE binaries (cryptographically signed iPXE builds for secure boot environments), low-bandwidth operation (downloading only the boot menu and kernel, fetching the rest on demand from content delivery networks), DHCP integration (supporting PXE chainloading via DHCP options 66 and 67 for seamless network boot), and community-driven menu (maintained list of verified boot URLs for popular operating systems with checksums for integrity verification).