Netboot from a Docker Container

This Docker container lets you PXE boot a whole bunch of installers and utilities on your local network, without much mucking about configuring DHCP and TFTP servers, using the excellent netboot.xyz project.

It provides a ProxyDHCP service, so for most clients your network's existing DHCP server (e.g. your home router) continues to hand out IP addresses as normal. However when a PXE client makes a DHCP request, this container also responds to announce itself as a TFTP network boot target. It does this using dnsmasq to run a very minimal DHCP server, on top of the linuxserver/docker-netboot.xyz container.

Why would I want this?!

I created this because I can never find a serviceable USB stick that's not in use when I want to run a Linux installer/memtest/Clonezilla etc, but I don't need to permanently run a DHCP and TFTP server - most of the time my router is just fine.

How do I run it on Linux?

On Linux you can run something like:

docker run --net=host --cap-add=NET_ADMIN -e DHCP_RANGE_START=192.168.0.1 samdbmg/dhcp-netboot.xyz

Make sure you adjust the IP address in DHCP_RANGE_START to the first address on your network. dnsmasq will automatically figure out the right subnet mask to use based on your local network setup.

Then boot another device on the same network and ask it to boot from "LAN" or "PXE" or whatever your device happens to call it. You should be presented with a nice menu of live disks, installers and utilities to run, which will be downloaded from the Internet as needed.

Why do I need --net=host?

To play DHCP server, the container needs to have an interface on the target network, rather than the Docker internal bridge.

What about Mac/Windows?

On Mac and Windows Docker is usually a VM running in the background, and the client is set up to (mostly) transparently pass commands through to that VM and deal with forwarded ports and the like.

Unfortunately that doesn't work here, because then your Docker host doesn't have an address on the network it is acting as DHCP server for. However all is not lost, because a Vagrantfile is provided here to let you run the container in a Virtualbox VM. By default a simple vagrant up will only start the demo (see below), but you can specify the machine to start instead:

DHCP_RANGE_START=192.168.0.1 vagrant up netboot
vagrant ssh netboot -c 'docker logs -f samdbmg-dhcp-netboot.xyz'

Note: You might be prompted to select which network the VM should connect to, choose the one matching the IP address you gave.

It will boot an Ubuntu VM, install Docker on it and then fetch and start the container. The second command will SSH you into the VM and start tailing the netboot containers logs.

For this to work on Windows using Hyper-V as a backend, you'll need to use an Administrator command prompt.

Firewall

Don't forget, if you've got a firewall running on your system you'll need to allow UDP traffic to ports 67 (DHCP), 69 (TFTP) and 4011 (PXE), along with TCP port 80 (HTTP) for the built in webserver. For ufw, try:

sudo ufw allow proto udp from any to any port 67
sudo ufw allow proto udp from any to any port 69
sudo ufw allow proto udp from any to any port 4011
sudo ufw allow proto tcp from any to any port 80

Don't forget to remove the rules when you're done!

Demo

There's a Vagrantfile in this directory that demonstrates starting up a Virtualbox VM managed by Vagrant, bridged onto your host network and configured to PXE boot. To try it, run ./run-demo.sh 192.168.0.1 which will launch the Docker container and bring up a Vagrant box.

Note: You might be prompted to select which network the VM should connect to, choose the one matching the IP address you gave.

You should see something like (also at slightly better quality on YouTube):

Note that the Virtualbox Extension Pack might be needed for PXE boot to work, and it's configured with 3GB RAM so that live disks ISOs can be downloaded.

Running the demo on Mac/Windows with Virtualbox

Run DHCP_RANGE_START=192.168.0.1 vagrant up netboot demo.

You'll probably be prompted twice for the network to attach to.

Building Locally

Should be as simple as docker build .

Why doesn't it work on $SCHOOL or $COMPANY network

Enterprise-grade networking gear usually has some protections to prevent just anyone running a DHCP server, which might mean this doesn't work across a corporate/school network. Sorry.

Contributing

I've found a problem Open an Issue on the repo, I'll try and get back to you.

I've fixed a problem Yay! Open a PR!