netboot

netboot

[Robert Millan]

In the wiki there's a link titled "GRUB2 netboot development" that points
to:

  http://www.inma.ucl.ac.be/~guffens/grub2_netboot/index.html

  (broken link)

Anyone knows what did this contain?  Is there uncommitted work for network
support there?  Who's guffens?

-- 
Robert Millan

My spam trap is honeypot@aybabtu.com.  Note: this address is only intended
for spam harvesters.  Writing to it will get you added to my black list.

Re: netboot

[Bean]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 07:58:44AM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> 
> In the wiki there's a link titled "GRUB2 netboot development" that points
> to:
> 
>   http://www.inma.ucl.ac.be/~guffens/grub2_netboot/index.html
> 
>   (broken link)
> 
> Anyone knows what did this contain?  Is there uncommitted work for network
> support there?  Who's guffens?

I found an old article on this subject:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2006-05/msg00020.html

It seems that vincent guffens has ported a glue to bind grub2 and etherboot
together. However, it's no longer maintained, and the patch is nowhere to be
found.

But porting etherboot to grub2 may not be that difficult after all, we can
use the driver from etherboot, and the glue code from Grub Legacy. The problem
is etherboot used in Grub Legacy is very old (5.0.5). The data structure has
changed a lot since then, so the glue code needs to be modified accordingly.

There is another method, that is to rely on PXE sevice. I have written a
PXE driver for grub4dos, it uses real mode service provided by PXE stack to
access remote files, for example, to load a kernel from server, uses:

kernel (pd)/vmlinuz
init (pd)/initrd

The advantage of this methid is that it doesn't rely on network card, the PXE
stack handles difference internally. The disadvantage is that the stack is
present only when booting from PXE ROM (hardware rom or software rom from
etherboot).

BTW, pxelinux also uses this method to access files.

-- 
Bean

Re: netboot

[Adam Lackorzynski]

On Tue Jun 26, 2007 at 17:01:26 +0800, Bean wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 07:58:44AM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> > 
> > In the wiki there's a link titled "GRUB2 netboot development" that points
> > to:
> > 
> >   http://www.inma.ucl.ac.be/~guffens/grub2_netboot/index.html
> > 
> >   (broken link)
> > 
> > Anyone knows what did this contain?  Is there uncommitted work for network
> > support there?  Who's guffens?
> 
> I found an old article on this subject:
> 
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2006-05/msg00020.html
> 
> It seems that vincent guffens has ported a glue to bind grub2 and etherboot
> together. However, it's no longer maintained, and the patch is nowhere to be
> found.
> 
> But porting etherboot to grub2 may not be that difficult after all, we can
> use the driver from etherboot, and the glue code from Grub Legacy. The problem
> is etherboot used in Grub Legacy is very old (5.0.5). The data structure has
> changed a lot since then, so the glue code needs to be modified accordingly.
> 
> There is another method, that is to rely on PXE sevice. I have written a
> PXE driver for grub4dos, it uses real mode service provided by PXE stack to
> access remote files, for example, to load a kernel from server, uses:
> 
> kernel (pd)/vmlinuz
> init (pd)/initrd
> 
> The advantage of this methid is that it doesn't rely on network card, the PXE
> stack handles difference internally. The disadvantage is that the stack is
> present only when booting from PXE ROM (hardware rom or software rom from
> etherboot).

There's also the PXE implementation in my patched grub1 version:

http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~adam/grub/0.97/

The grub-0.97-os.3.README has some more infos, version os.5 is the current
released version.


Adam
-- 
Adam                 adam@os.inf.tu-dresden.de
  Lackorzynski         http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~adam/

netboot

[Alberto Brealey]

i'm trying to netboot my ss4 to install ultra-1.0.9 on it.

i followed the directions on the users guide, set up arp/rarp and tftp.

however, whenever i issue a 'boot net' on the prompt, i crash the switches
of the campus network... (really shitty by the way, the switches)

i have one question:

on another machine i have to run arp -s and rarp -s with the MAC and IP of
the machine i want to install? on both arp and rarp?

i browsed the man pages and i think i'm doing right, but the switches
continue crashing...

any help would be appreciated

alberto

Re: netboot

[Gert Doering]

Hi,

Alberto Brealey wrote:
> however, whenever i issue a 'boot net' on the prompt, i crash the switches
> of the campus network... (really shitty by the way, the switches)

Sounds like a real bad bug in the switches' firmware.  Nothing a host can
do should ever crash a switch.

gert

-- 
USENET is *not* the non-clickable part of WWW!
                                                           //www.muc.de/~gert/
Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert@greenie.muc.de
fax: +49-89-35655025                        gert.doering@physik.tu-muenchen.de