Thanks to a patch from Mathieu Geli, live-initramfs as of version 1.99.1-1 supports a boot parameter called fetch.

That means, that it is enough to have a bootloader (syslinux, grub, whatever) and a kernel with the initrd image on a medium (cdrom, usb-stick, whatever) to boot a Debian Live system directly from the Internet or the local network without needing to setup a netboot environment (as in PXE). Just type:

	live fetch=http://example.com/my_image.squashfs

at the boot prompt. Whithin the boot process of the live system, the squashfs image will be once downloaded into RAM. After that point, no network access is required anymore. This is also the reason why it was invented initially, it is an alternative to the conventional netboot (PXE with tftp for boot and shared root over a network filesystem such as cifs, nfs or smb) where permanent network access is required, not a replacement.

Temporary limitations

• At the moment, the amount of RAM required to run a web booted live session is equal to the size of the squashfs image. Because squashfs compression is quite good, this is not so much of a problem on reasonably modern machines (512MB for a complete Xfce Debian desktop, 758MB for a complete GNOME or KDE Debian desktop system). Nevertheless, improvements to use a local swap partition to store the image are on the way (including caching and updating).
  
  
• Due to a still pending move of the machine where live.debian.net is hosted, there are not yet autobuild squashfs images available. Later, you can just boot with something similar as: live fetch=http://live.debian.net/webboot/etch.