[Etherboot-developers] Error reporting...

[<ebi...@ln...>]

We are working on improving our error reporting when things go wrong, 
and I've been trying to figure out how to do that for etherboot.  The
model I'm working with is that of a cluster so in normal practice the
only connection  between an administrator and a machine is through the
ethernet connection. 

It is easy enough to hack the code to broadcast a udp packet to a specific
port and have some proprietary software pick up the error message.  Doing
it in a way that will benefit everyone using etherboot is trickier.

What looks like a solution is to send an SNMP trap.  This could be picked
up by any standard SNMP software.  What remains are designing the trap
and figuring where what MIB to put it under.  Currently the plan is to
get an enterprise number of LinuxNetworX and find a place in our MIB tree
for it, but I'm not certain if this is the best way to do this.

The case where I'm thinking about reporting errors is not when a timeout
occurs and a retransmit happens but instead when etherboot gives up.  I'm
pretty familiar with that code path :)

Comments, critiscims, and especially better ideas are welcome.

Eric