Portable Network Boot Environment

ezPXE basically is an Ansible playbook which configures a local Vagrant VM or a Linux server in a home or corporate network with a dnsmasq DHCP proxy providing a pxelinux network boot environment, bootable from any PXE capable system.

Ever needed to do a quick installation of Windows 10 or Ubuntu but didn't want to go through the annoying process of creating a bootable USB drive? ezPXE provides a fully functional network boot environment with minimal configuration effort for exactly that use case! Just have the Vagrant environment and some operation system ISO laying on your local laptop disk ready and run vagrant up to get started.

Requirements

Ansible
VirtualBox + Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack
Vagrant + vagrant-persistant-storage plugin

Quick Start

To set up a local environment with Vagrant follow those steps:

Fill up the images/ folder with the desired ISO files.
Create a copy of boot.yml.example:
```
cp boot.yml.example boot.yml
```
Populate boot.yml with the desired boot environments.
Install the required vagrant-persistent-storage Vagrant plugin.
vagrant up

Hint: The first run of the Ansible playbook will take some time, because all the ISO files are being transfered into the VM and extracted. The VM's data disk is persistent and will survive vagrant destroy without loosing any data on in.

Configuration

To provide a network boot environment, a new item needs to be created in boot.yml (for real world examples see boot.yml.example).

name: a unique identifier ([a-zA-Z0-9_]) for each item.
title: a descriptive name for that item (e.g.: Windows 10)
src: wether the filename of an ISO image in the images/ folder or an URL pointing to a mini.iso on a network/internet server.
template:
- iso: a locally available live system or installation ISO file capable of being booted from a raw ISO file (e.g. VMware ESXi).
- netboot: a small ISO file directly from the internet (e.g.: netboot.xyz).
- live: a live-boot capable Linux installation media, except Ubuntu.
- casper: an Ubuntu live-boot installation media
- windows: any Windows installation media.

When adding new boot environments into an already running ezPXE setup, just run vagrant provision and everything will be updated inside the environment.

Windows Installation

When booting into a Windows installation media, wait until the setup screen appears and press Shift+F10. Enter startnet.cmd into the command line window to start the installation from the automatically provided network share. From there on it's like installing Windows from an USB drive.

Limitations