I wanted to gather some knowledge and ideas here. In my company, we might deploy a Qubes OS workstation for a very small group of people (or at least evaluate what’s possible). The idea is to build a VM (still Windows 10) so that these people can access M365.
My question: Is it possible to install a Windows VM not via an ISO file but through my central PXE server? I have read some posts where it was about installing a complete Qubes OS via PXE. Would it also be possible to install Windows 10 that way?
Not directly - PXE requires normally boot settings sent via DHCP, but qubes VM don’t see those from the real network in any configuration. And also, I think our build of QEMU/SeaBIOS/QEMU has network boot disabled.
But, you may try with iPXE (ipxe.org) - get an iPXE boot disk (usb, cd, whatever other format you prefer) and start a VM from this. Then, use it to boot Windows installation from your central server (see iPXE - open source boot firmware [howto:winpe]). Disclaimer: I never tried this
As a side effect, you main gain a better boot integrity, if you use HTTPS (nor sure if Windows supports it here, but just an idea).
Thanks for the idea with iPXE…
The ISO boots without any problems.
I assigned the network card directly to the Qube so it could send its DHCP request through it… unfortunately, that didn’t work. So I connected an old hub (great for monitoring traffic) and ran a tcpdump on another laptop. Unfortunately, the network card doesn’t send any packets when I start iPXE.
Now, I suspect that maybe the firmware for the network card isn’t included in iPXE, but I’m not sure about that.
Does anyone know if Qubes OS might be interfering in some way?
