Re: [Etherboot-users] pxe boot ?

[Cristian M. <cri...@on...>]

* Roy Wiseman <roy...@ya...> [24-09-05 18:19]:
 
> Hi,
> 
> This is a little more tricky than I was hoping !!
> 
> First of all PXE or Etherboot, I don't get the
> difference. Ok, Etherboot maybe offers more options
> and piggy-backs off the PXE standard, if that's all
> then that makes sense ?

 Etherboot was born from the same reason as PXE, netbooting a computer,
but PXE requires a second stage program due to the size constrains of the
implementation. Etherboot, more versatile grace to it's open source
nature, can directly load the OS from the network, but the file downloaded
must be produced by the mknbi program (mknbi-linux, mknbi-dos).
It can function also as a PXE boot stack for NICs that don't have that,
which is great for people that want a unified setup based on PXE.
> Second, Rom-o-matic offers the below eepro100 options.
> I'm stumped, 20 or so options, but which matches my
> card !?!? does anyone know how to find this out ?? I

The multiple choices are for generating a .rom file to be written on the
card's EEPROM (or directly in the on-board BIOS of the PC). You should pick
one based on the PCI ID's of the card, but for generating an image that is
not going to the NIC's EEPROM this is not necessary, you can pick any of
them, the result will be the same.
> took the first in the list, and got a zpxe as said on
> an EtherBoot site. ok, great it seemed to work,
> EtherBoot came up from PXE boot after DHCP picked up
> an IP, so it correctly took the Etherboot image and
> ran it, so I get the option boot from NIC or Quit. ok,
> great, I want to boot NIC, but there is no option
> either here or in the extended options on rom-o-matic
> to give a network image file. ie. in a really simple
> case, say I have a DOS boot image .ima file and I want
> EtherBoot to grab that and boot it. I mean this sounds
> incredibly simple, but it's not obvious, how can I
> tell EtherBoot where to go for it's second stage image
> ??? I've been reading the docs and finding nothing on
> this.

 To boot a DOS image (let's say a floppy image) you can get away with PXE
booting and pxelinux from Syslinux (syslinux.zytor.com). PXE booting loads
pxelinux.0 that cand boot, via memdisk, a DOS floppy.
 If you want more a more elaborate setup, than etherboot and mknbi-dos can
be the answer, you just need to learn to use mknbi-dos and instruct
etherboot to load it after the steps that you have taken so far.

 Please look in the Etherboot wiki for details of this solution, a good
page is at:
 http://wiki.etherboot.org/pmwiki.php/Main/BootingMemdisk,
the whole wiki will explain a lot of the inner workings of net-booting.

hth,

mitu