[Etherboot-developers] ISCSI Boot Support or ISCSI boot floppy image?

[satadru p. <sa...@um...>]

I've been looking at various ways of booting WinPE (Windows
Preinstallation Environment) off of the network, and after searching the
net and the etherboot archives, it seems that the two most viable
methods are setting up a RIS server (ugly) or somehow try to get the RIS
boot disk tagged for etherboot (ugly, especially considering the likely
lack of support for my NIC, the sis900). =20

I noticed that IBM has some sort of combined implementation of iscsi and
something similar to etherboot:

http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/projects/storage/iboot/faq.html

How hard would this be to implement inside etherboot?  Open Source iscsi
drivers exist:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3D23858&release_id=3D=
133985

and here:

http://linux-iscsi.sourceforge.net/

What I would like to be able to do is setup a linux box to serve iscsi,
and then use a etherboot boot rom to boot off of that network drive.

Is this too far outside to purview of the etherboot project to be done?=20
Etherboot would then have to maintain some process in memory to be able
to communicate with the iscsi server while the machine was running.

This would be Really cool, and would also suddenly make all of those
machines out there with etherboot supported roms iscsi bootable
machines.  If this isn't possible, does anybody know of a iscsi boot
image that will let me etherboot to a second stage bootloader that would
support iscsi?

satadru
InterCooperative Council at the University of Michigan