Forem: Benedikt Schackenberg

Building Octofleet: A Week of Zero-Touch Server Deployments (Looking for Contributors! 🐙)

Benedikt Schackenberg — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:15:25 +0000

Hey dev.to!

This is just a hobby project I've been hacking on because it's mega fun - and I wanted to share what happened this week. Also: I'm looking for contributors! More on that at the end.

What is Octofleet?

Octofleet is an open-source endpoint management platform I've been building. Think of it as an octopus 🐙 with 8 arms handling all your server tasks:

📊 Inventory - Track all your machines
🔧 Patching - Keep systems updated
💼 Job System - Run scripts remotely
📦 Packages - Deploy software
🛡️ Vulnerability Tracking - Stay secure
🖥️ Screen Sharing - See what's happening
⚙️ Service Orchestration - Manage services across fleet
🚀 PXE Deployment - Zero-touch OS installs ← NEW THIS WEEK!

This Week's Adventure: PXE Boot

I wanted to solve a problem: How do I deploy Windows Server to 10 VMs without touching each one?

The answer: PXE Boot + iPXE + WinPE + HTTP

The Goal

Enter MAC address in Web UI
Select OS (Windows Server 2025, Ubuntu, etc.)
Click "Create Job"
Power on server
☕ Grab coffee
Come back to a fully installed, domain-joined server

What I Built

Backend (FastAPI + PostgreSQL):

Provisioning API with CRUD for tasks, images, templates
Dynamic iPXE script generation per MAC address
Status callbacks so machines report their progress

Frontend (Next.js + Tailwind):

Provisioning dashboard with live task queue
"New Job" dialog with MAC/OS selection
Auto-refresh every 10 seconds

PXE Infrastructure:

dnsmasq for DHCP + TFTP
nginx serving boot files over HTTP
Custom WinPE image with curl.exe injected

The Fun Bugs 🐛

Oh boy, where do I start...

Bug 1: "Bad CPIO magic" on Hyper-V

Turns out wimboot has issues with Hyper-V Gen1 (BIOS mode)
Fix: Use Gen2 (UEFI) - works perfectly!

Bug 2: SMB is too slow in WinPE

WinPE's SMB client waits forever for DNS
Fix: HTTP everything! Injected curl.exe into WinPE

Bug 3: DISM Error 87

Scripts weren't running...
Cause: Unix line endings (LF) instead of Windows (CRLF)
Fix: unix2dos startnet.cmd 🤦

Bug 4: VirtIO disk not found

KVM VMs couldn't see their disks
Wrong driver: viostor.inf vs vioscsi.inf
SCSI needs vioscsi!

Current Status

✅ Working:

Hyper-V Gen2 deployment
Windows Server 2025 (all editions)
Full unattend.xml automation
German locale & timezone
RDP enabled out of the box
Web UI connected to real API

🚧 In Progress:

Ubuntu/Linux support (Autoinstall)
Windows 11 client deployment
KVM/libvirt testing
Live status callbacks in UI

The Tech Stack

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              Octofleet UI                   │
│         (Next.js + Tailwind CSS)            │
└─────────────────┬───────────────────────────┘
                  │ HTTP/REST
┌─────────────────▼───────────────────────────┐
│           Octofleet Backend                 │
│      (FastAPI + PostgreSQL + asyncpg)       │
└─────────────────┬───────────────────────────┘
                  │
┌─────────────────▼───────────────────────────┐
│             PXE Server                      │
│   (dnsmasq + nginx + iPXE + WinPE)          │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Why I Love This Project

It's the perfect intersection of:

Networking (PXE, DHCP, TFTP, HTTP)
Windows internals (WinPE, DISM, BCD)
Linux (dnsmasq, Samba, nginx)
Modern web (React, FastAPI, WebSockets)
DevOps (automation, CI/CD, infrastructure as code)

Every day I learn something new. This week alone I learned:

How iPXE works internally
WinPE customization
The difference between BIOS and UEFI boot
Why SMB in WinPE is painful
How to inject files into a boot image

Looking for Contributors! 🙋‍♂️

This is where you come in! I'm looking for people who want to:

Use it - Test it in your homelab, report bugs
Hack on it - Pick an issue, send a PR
Document - Help make the docs better
Design - The UI could always be prettier
Ideas - What features would YOU want?

No experience required! If you're learning and want a real project to contribute to, this is it. I'll help you get started.

Good First Issues

🐧 Add Ubuntu 24.04 support
📝 Improve API documentation
🧪 Write more tests
🎨 Dark mode improvements
📊 Dashboard widgets

How to Get Started

Star the repo: github.com/BenediktSchackenberg/octofleet
Check the issues: Look for good first issue labels
Join the Discord: Link in the repo README
Say hi! Drop a comment here or open a discussion

What's Next?

Next week I'm planning to:

Get Ubuntu autoinstall working
Add Windows 11 support
Build a "Systems Registry" to track provisioned machines
Maybe record a demo video?

Conclusion

Building Octofleet has been incredibly fun. There's something magical about:

Clicking a button
Watching a VM boot from the network
Seeing Windows install itself
Getting a notification "Server ready!"

All without touching a single USB stick or clicking through an installer.

If this sounds interesting to you - come join the fun! 🐙

Links:

🐙 GitHub: BenediktSchackenberg/octofleet
📝 Blog: schackenberg.com
💬 Discord: Link in repo

Happy deploying!

I Built an Open-Source Endpoint Manager Because Enterprise Tools Are Ridiculous

Benedikt Schackenberg — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:43:52 +0000

Let me start with a confession: I have too many computers.

Three Windows Servers, a handful of workstations, a Linux box running... stuff. You know how it goes. One day you're setting up a home lab, next thing you know you're managing a small fleet and wondering which machine has that outdated Log4j version.

Commercial endpoint management tools exist, sure. But have you seen the pricing? We're talking $10-15 per endpoint per month for the basics. PDQ Deploy wants $500/year minimum. Microsoft Intune is... well, it's Microsoft. And don't get me started on trying to self-host SCCM.

So I did what any reasonable developer does when faced with expensive software: I built my own.

Meet Octofleet

Octofleet is an open-source endpoint management platform. It's what I wished existed when I started looking for solutions: simple to deploy, actually useful, and doesn't require a finance department to approve.

Fair warning: This is still beta software. I'm running it in production on my own infrastructure (because I like living dangerously), but you should probably test it properly before deploying to anything critical. That said — it works, and it's been stable for weeks now.

What It Actually Does

The feature list grew organically from "things I kept needing":

Hardware & Software Inventory
Every machine reports what's installed, what hardware it has, disk space, network adapters — the works. I got tired of RDP-ing into servers just to check if something was installed.

Remote Job Execution
Run PowerShell scripts or Bash commands across your fleet. Schedule them, target specific groups, see results in real-time. No more "let me just quickly SSH into 5 machines to check something."

Vulnerability Scanning
This one surprised me how useful it became. The platform pulls CVE data from NVD and cross-references it with installed software. Suddenly I knew exactly which machines had vulnerable versions of stuff I'd forgotten I installed.

Auto-Remediation
Found a vulnerability? Octofleet can automatically update the affected software via winget or Chocolatey. It's like having a very focused, very patient sysadmin working 24/7.

Performance Monitoring
Real-time CPU, RAM, and disk metrics with a "hotspot matrix" that shows you at a glance which machines need attention. No more guessing which server is struggling.

The Architecture (For Those Who Care)

I went with a stack I actually enjoy working with:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              Frontend (Next.js)             │
│            React + Tailwind CSS             │
└──────────────────┬──────────────────────────┘
                   │ REST API
┌──────────────────▼──────────────────────────┐
│              Backend (FastAPI)              │
│               Python 3.12                   │
└──────────────────┬──────────────────────────┘
                   │
┌──────────────────▼──────────────────────────┐
│      PostgreSQL 16 + TimescaleDB            │
│         (for time-series metrics)           │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

    ┌─────────┐  ┌─────────┐  ┌─────────┐
    │ Windows │  │ Windows │  │  Linux  │
    │  Agent  │  │  Agent  │  │  Agent  │
    │ (.NET 8)│  │ (.NET 8)│  │ (Bash)  │
    └────┬────┘  └────┬────┘  └────┬────┘
         └────────────┴────────────┘
               HTTPS polling

Why TimescaleDB? Because storing weeks of performance metrics in regular PostgreSQL tables gets ugly fast. TimescaleDB handles time-series data compression and retention automatically.

The Windows agent is a single .NET 8 executable (~8MB) that runs as a service. No installer dependencies, no runtime requirements on the target machine. The Linux agent is a bash script because... sometimes simple wins.

Getting Started

If you want to try it:

git clone https://github.com/BenediktSchackenberg/octofleet.git
cd octofleet
docker compose up -d

That's it. Open http://localhost:3000, login with admin/admin, and you've got a running instance.

For agents, there's a one-liner for Windows:

iwr "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BenediktSchackenberg/octofleet/main/Install-OctofleetAgent.ps1" -OutFile "$env:TEMP\install.ps1"; & "$env:TEMP\install.ps1"

The agent auto-registers with your server and starts reporting immediately.

How It Compares

I'm not going to pretend Octofleet replaces enterprise solutions. But for homelabs, small businesses, or anyone who just wants basic fleet management without the complexity:

Feature	Octofleet	PDQ Deploy	NinjaRMM	SCCM
Price	Free	$500+/yr	$3+/endpoint/mo	LOL
Self-hosted	✅	✅	❌	✅
Setup time	5 min	30 min	15 min	Days
Linux support	✅	❌	✅	Kinda
Vuln scanning	✅	❌	✅	✅
Open source	✅	❌	❌	❌

The big players have more features, better polish, enterprise support. But they also have enterprise complexity and enterprise pricing. Pick your poison.

The Honest "Beta Software" Section

Things that work well:

Inventory collection is solid
Job execution is reliable
The dashboard is genuinely useful day-to-day
Auto-updates for agents work (finally, after some painful debugging)

Things I'm still working on:

Documentation could be better (it exists, but it's... sparse)
macOS agent doesn't exist yet
Reporting/exports are basic
No mobile app (and probably never will be)

Known quirks:

First-time setup needs you to configure the gateway URL manually
Some edge cases in vulnerability matching (CVE data is messy)
The UI has some rough edges on mobile

Why I'm Sharing This

Honestly? I want feedback.

This started as a personal project to scratch my own itch. But it's grown into something that might be useful for others, and I'd love to know:

What features are missing that would make this useful for you?
What's confusing about the setup?
What breaks when you try it?

I'm also very open to contributions. The codebase is reasonably clean (I think), the stack is modern, and there's plenty of low-hanging fruit for anyone wanting to contribute to an open-source project.

Links

GitHub: github.com/BenediktSchackenberg/octofleet
Screenshots: Check the README
License: MIT (do whatever you want with it)

If you try it, let me know how it goes. Open an issue, leave a comment here, or just star the repo if you think it's cool.

And if you're running a fleet of machines and paying too much for basic management tools — maybe give this a shot. Worst case, you'll have wasted 5 minutes on docker compose up. Best case, you'll save a bunch of money and have something you can actually customize.

Currently managing 9 endpoints with Octofleet. My wallet is happier, even if my spare time isn't.