Product Tour: Network-Booting an Office PC and Rolling It Back

The PC keeps doing the work with its own CPU, memory and graphics. Its system disk lives on central distributed storage, so it can be snapshotted on a schedule and rolled back to a known state. This tour uses a real physical desktop, not a VM.

Version: release 81fce3de6 (2026-11-03), cloud PC asset pack 20261103.1Plan: BusinessTest dates: 2026-10-30 (boot and templates), 2026-10-23 (snapshots)Environment: lab: physical AMD desktop (BIOS and UEFI) and VM terminals; distributed storage test cluster; site node running as a VMMaterial: recording and screenshots pending

Walkthrough

The PC starts Nodekeeper’s signed iPXE — from the network (PXE) or from a boot USB/ISO. BIOS and UEFI both work; Secure Boot is switched off.
A Nodekeeper boot screen asks for the cloud PC password, plus a one-time code if TOTP is enabled for that PC.
The system disk is attached from distributed storage. A dedicated NK site node (VM or physical) serves iSCSI boot for Windows; Linux PCs map their block disk from distributed storage directly.
Windows or Linux starts and runs on the PC itself. The user works as on any desktop.
Take a snapshot by hand, or let the hourly / daily schedule keep a set number of them.
Make a test change, shut the PC down, roll back to the snapshot (confirmed with 2FA), start it again and check the change is gone.

Screenshot pending — D4-a Physical PC: iPXE start and Nodekeeper login screen (photo of the monitor) A real, irreversibly redacted capture from a test environment will be placed here

Recording pending — D4-b Snapshot list, rollback confirmation and the PC after rollback A real, irreversibly redacted capture from a test environment will be placed here

Test record

Test record
Product version	pre-release builds of 2026-10-23 and 2026-10-30, shipped in release 81fce3de6; cloud PC asset pack 20261103.1
Terminals	a physical AMD desktop (Windows in BIOS and in UEFI mode, Debian); an office PC through a USB network adapter; Windows UEFI clones on VM terminals
Operating systems	Windows 10/11 (24H2) templates built from the customer’s own licensed ISO; Linux templates Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04
Boot	PXE or boot media → signed iPXE; BIOS and UEFI; Secure Boot off
Data path	Windows: iSCSI from a Nodekeeper site node in the same site, per-session CHAP, on an isolated storage network. Linux: block device on distributed storage, mapped directly.
Result, 2026-10-30	Windows “save as template” passed end to end in BIOS and UEFI mode; new PCs from the template completed first-boot setup, extended drive C: automatically, had network right after the first login and ran the first-boot script
Result, 2026-10-23	hourly automatic snapshots of a cloud PC disk with “keep 2” — the oldest was pruned on schedule; snapshot space was measured and counted against the owner’s quota; a 2FA-confirmed rollback of a storage volume matched the snapshot checksum, and rollback was also verified on VM disks
Snapshot consistency	crash-consistent (no VSS, no guest agent)
Scale	a few terminals; no concurrent-boot or large-scale test, so no performance figures are published
Manual intervention	Windows needs a one-time network-card warm-up for each new NIC model and slot layout

Limits and prerequisites

Secure Boot must be off (the iPXE is not Microsoft-signed).
PCs boot from storage in their own site; booting a PC over a WAN link is not supported. Several offices can still be managed from one panel.
The PC needs the storage network while it runs: if the storage or network path is lost, Windows stops. There is no offline mode.
The site node that serves iSCSI for Windows has no automatic takeover yet; if it fails, Windows PCs lose their disk until it is back or replaced. Linux PCs that are already running keep their disk.
Rollback needs the PC switched off and a 2FA confirmation; a snapshot of the current state is taken first, and changes after the chosen snapshot are discarded.
Windows licences and graphics drivers are the customer’s; Nodekeeper does not distribute Windows images.

← All tour topics Next: Shared base image and capacity Request sandbox access

The sandbox is invite-only and not open yet; there is no public live demo. Please do not send passwords, keys or customer data with a request.

N Nodekeeper

All-in-one Linux server management agent.

Product

Features Pricing Docs

Company

About Contact 中文

Support

[email protected] WhatsApp: +817093066006