[Etherboot-users] The coolest thing

[Marty C. <md...@et...>]

The years pass quickly.

In the Spring of 1999 I was in Durham, North Carolina, at a small trade 
show called Linux Expo put on by an interesting young company called 
Red Hat Software.  I was looking for the coolest thing I could find 
there.  I knew I wanted to hack, and Free Software was where I wanted 
to do that hacking.

Having spent four years working at MIT in the early to mid 1980s, and 
having shared an office with Richard Stallman, I had seen and 
participated firsthand in the evolution of the ideas that became GNU.  
The philosophical and moral basis of Free Software was and is something 
that I came to understand and appreciate.

In the years since working at MIT, I had worked with a few companies, 
and in 1989 I started my own company to help people who use Apple 
Macintosh computers make the most of them.  I still own that company, 
and still have quite a few of the clients who I started the business 
with.  It has been rewarding to work with people for so long, and to 
see their businesses grow, and to be helpful to them.

But back in 1999 at Linux Expo I was looking for something cool.  
Something so interesting that I just had to understand it and hack it 
and help make it more than it was.  I had no idea what it would be, but 
I went to Durham with the desire to simply walk around with open eyes 
and an open mind and see what happened.

After wandering around the exhibit hall, and taking in a few seminars, 
I found a booth with something called "Thin Clients".  Having dealt a 
little bit with Sun workstations at MIT, I was not completely 
unfamiliar with the concept of client machines booting from a network, 
but to see the tiny boxes serving Free Software -- that was powerful -- 
and very, very cool.

The man at the booth was Glenn Jacobson of Unique Systems, and he was 
excited about using these Thin Client workstations to reduce costs for 
businesses.  He talked about both the cost of the hardware, but also of 
TCO, or Total Cost of Ownership.  He made a compelling case for the 
technology, and I certainly thought it was cool.  The little boxes he 
demonstrated ran proprietary software, however, and so I made a note of 
them, but didn't see much of a hacking opportunity.  (Glenn passed away 
last year, and we will miss him).

Later in the show I met Ron Colcernian and Jim McQuillan who described 
how there were people who were working on creating Open Source boot 
ROMs for network cards, and pointed me to the Netboot project.  Jim, of 
course, went on to create and lead LTSP.org, a very successful Open 
Source thin client project.

After the show, I kept thinking about thin clients and network booting 
and how powerful this combination could be.  It was something that fit 
so perfectly with the idea of Free Software.  It was something I had to 
understand and support.  I also liked the closeness to bare metal of 
network booting.  Understanding how things work is a passion for me.

I sent my first message to the Netboot mailing list in July 1999.  
Shortly after that I began a conversation with Ken Yap that has 
continued to this day.

Over the years I have done what I can to support, enhance, and 
proliferate Etherboot, and Open Source network booting in general.  It 
still remains something I find very, very cool.  Over the years I have 
hacked drivers, figured out how to make Etherboot look like a Linux 
kernel so it could be loaded by LILO and GRUB, figured out how to make 
Etherboot ROMs PNP compatible, and funded and managed PXE integration 
into Etherboot. I also enjoy helping people on the mailing lists, and 
have hopefully gotten some people turned on to Free Software, both the 
technology and the community aspects.

I registered the etherboot.org domain in September 2002, and have 
hosted DNS, email, and various other services since then.  It's some of 
the invisible machinery, but it needs to be done, and I am happy (and 
able) to do it.

Then there are the LinuxWorld Expo .ORG booths.  I have represented 
Etherboot at seven shows so far, and I recently learned that we have 
been invited to the Boston show in February 2005, which will be eight.

I still enjoy watching people's faces as they see a machine booted from 
an Ethernet card with a ROM on it.  It still retains the magic after 
all these years.  And then when it occurs to them that using Linux and 
other Free Software that they can deploy a network of machines 
inexpensively and maintainably, I feel good about the time spent.

Many thanks to Jim McQuillan of LTSP for helping make sure we got it 
for this Boston show.  It has been a great pleasure and privilege to 
represent Etherboot at the premier Linux trade shows in the US so many 
times.  It requires a lot of work to do it, but I think it has been 
well worth the effort.

Last but not least, perhaps the single most useful thing I did for Open 
Source network booting was to create and host the rom-o-matic.net web 
site, which allows anyone to create Etherboot ROMs on demand.  It has 
been up for over 4 years now (since 27 October 2000), and now generates 
over 200000 ROM images a year, all free, and without commercial 
interruption.  It has taken a lot of time and energy to support this 
site, but it has been very rewarding.  It reflects my sensibilities in 
a lot of ways -- minimalist, reliable, and over the years people seem 
to have just come to expect it to work.  That is a great compliment, 
both to me and to all the people who have made Etherboot so successful. 
  It just works, and often people don't even think twice about how that 
happens.

I needed to say all the preceding because looking back sometimes helps 
one look forward, and after a lot of thought, I have decided that I 
want to go in a new direction.  Ken and I have corresponded privately, 
and he has given his blessing, for which I am most grateful.

So, what do I plan to do now?

I plan to revive and lead the NILO project, which has been dormant for 
a number of years.

Nilo.org has some background on the project, and it, like Etherboot, is 
hosted on Sourceforge.net.  NILO was originally conceived as an 
evolution of Etherboot and Netboot -- an Open Source PXE client.  I 
would like to continue this work, and to extend it.  Initially it will 
be much like Etherboot, but over time I expect there will be some 
divergence, and hopefully both projects will help each other and 
inspire each other.

Why do I want to do this?

Well, I guess the simple answer is that I think it would be a good 
thing, both for me and the Free Software community.  Etherboot has 
grown and prospered, and I have enjoyed helping it do so.  At this 
point, however, I find myself wishing to lead a project of my own, and 
to try things that would be incompatible with some of the directions I 
think Ken wants Etherboot to move in.

One of the great features of Free Software is that the code remains 
Free (libre) no matter what happens.  This has the nice property that 
if someone wants to use code from one project as the basis for another 
project, they may.  We all understand this going into a project, and 
because of this, code can be reused and improved and help other 
projects in ways unimagined by the original authors.

It is important to me is to create as little disturbance to the 
Etherboot project as possible with this transition.  Etherboot has a 
healthy number of core developers and receives patches from quite a few 
people.

While I wish to take the code in some different directions, I also wish 
Etherboot to continue to prosper, and, as Ken and I have discussed, I 
expect to continue to be peripherally associated with Etherboot, and to 
contribute where I can.

So, what's next?

This message is the first step in letting folks know that I am going to 
be working on NILO.  I am not sure exactly what will happen next or 
when, but I think that this is the right thing for me to do. I hope to 
work on creation of something that is both personally rewarding and 
helpful to the Free Software community.

Since Etherboot has been chosen to participate in the LinuxWorld Expo 
that is scheduled for February in Boston, I plan to represent the 
project there one last time.  I also plan to continue support of 
rom-o-matic.net.  I will be around, and will help when I can.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank everyone who I have worked with on Etherboot over 
the years.  You have all made this a wondrous and wonderful experience, 
and I appreciate that you've allowed my code to touch your machines, 
and hopefully my words have been helpful.

I am not disappearing, merely becoming less involved in this particular 
project, and finding and following my path.

Thanks for the privilege of being of service,

Marty

-- 
     Try: http://rom-o-matic.net/ to make Etherboot images instantly.

    Name: Marty Connor
US Mail: Entity Cyber, Inc.; P.O. Box 391827;
          Cambridge, MA 02139; USA
   Voice: (617) 491-6935; Fax: (617) 491-7046
   Email: md...@et...
     Web: http://www.etherboot.org/