devedse

A while back I came across https://lanparty.house and got immediately excited by the idea of network booting for LAN parties. I wanted to build something that would let me boot from and manage network disks all in one place. The main usecase for me would be to create a base image with steam/discord/etc preinstalled and have my friends boot into that image and play the games I've already setup.

Like most projects, it started simple. But as I dug deeper, the challenges got increasingly harder (injecting drivers into base images, hacking around in the windows registry, etc). I spent countless evenings on this (with a pretty high WTF-per-minute count), but I'm genuinely happy with how far it's come. Last weekend, some friends and I actually pulled off a self-hosted LAN party using my app across a bunch of different PC configurations, and it worked.

So I wanted to share my solution for network booting: DevePXEBoot.

Link: https://devepxeboot.devedse.click/

Discord: https://discord.gg/3Jb72sRJ6T

If you're interested in trying it out, need help getting set up, have ideas for improvements, or encounter any of the bugs I've probably left in, feel free to join the Discord. I'll do my best to help (just keep in mind this is an evening/weekend project for me :) ).

Some of the coolest features I've implemented:

* Complete virtual disk management, thin provisioning, and real-time usage monitoring. Each user gets persistent storage that survives reboots. * A drag and drop interface for building custom boot workflows. You can create boot automation sequences visually without writing any code. Build flows that automatically detect hardware, clone disks, inject drivers, and boot, all without user intervention. * DevePXEBoot can automatically detect each PC's network hardware and inject the correct drivers into the boot image on the fly. This means you can have Dell, HP, Lenovo, and custom built PCs all booting from the same master image without any manual driver management. The system creates hardware-specific clones automatically, so each participant gets an image that works on their machine without manual intervention.

I wanted to keep this accessible for homelabbers like us. I really hope you guys can use this to host your own lan party's. And ofcourse if someone would like to use this commercially feel free to get in touch with me (deploying this on a large scale would obviously be a dream of mine).

Hey Kenton & the others,

What version of linux are you using? I did try to get it to work with a few and I believe only managed to make CachyOS work

Besides that, today I also finished my own netboot solution (that still uses Windows). I'm quite happy with the state now where it's able to inject drivers (so it works on multiple systems with different hardware), and also fix an issue with the latest Win11 Nov update where it suddenly didn't netboot anymore.

If anyone is interested I actually made a small post on it today: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1q6kpto/devepxeboo...