Re: [Etherboot-developers] http/dns (was: List of NICs by popularity)

[<ke...@et...>]

>> Except that I don't think the Debian project would appreciate one server
>> getting all the hits. So Debian should probably start a debian-o-matic
>> site and ask the user for the region in addition to asking for the NIC.
>
>They could build a menu.nbi that does this for them. It would be
>reasonably small and thus be comparative to the user hitting
>www.debian.org with their browser before they find out what their
>mirror is called exactly.

But they have to go through one menu to choose the NIC so why not do it
all at once?

>Does etherboot support loading over network boundaries at all, e.g.
>select the specified "routers" entry from the dhcp response if the
>requested ip is obviously out of range? That is one of the things I
>thought about on my long train ride home this evening...
>
>Do 5.2 and 5.0.11 support (if the proto is compiled in) URLs to be
>specified, e.g.
>tftp:// [<serverip> [:<port>]] / <filename>
>nfs:// [<serverip>] / <filename>
>?

I think gatewaying works for TFTP, which uses the first gateway
specified in option-whatever as per RFC. There's no option to select a
second or third gateway because there's no routing table. The other
protocols should be written to do the same. This is of course providing
the address handed out by DHCP is allowed by firewalls to connect to the
Internet directly.

But note that many sites use a HTTP proxy so you'd have to get the HTTP
code to understand proxies as well. The URL should also be kept short
since it has to fit in 128 bytes, or was it 64?

>How far did multicast support get?

I think Eric is disappointed that nobody fixed up the other drivers to
do multicast. Hungry for work?

>Should we have support for dns resolution?
>- Yes we should, if not only for the debian case! They could have e.g.
>  etherboot-install.debian.org revolving A record to all of their http
>  servers or so!

Well I have no objections if you write a resolver client that can be
ifdefed. You'd have to query the DNS servers in option-whatever.

All this Etherboot development to support Debian loading? Now I know why
dselect was so clunky. :-) Surely it's simpler to ask the user to run a
HTTP proxy (probably about 50 lines of Perl) on an internal machine. It
can serve on a port > 1024 so you don't have to be root and do the DNS
and HTTP proxying, including understanding proxy.pac as some sites have.
It could also contain the smarts to choose the right server.  Then you'd
only have to give Etherboot a url like:
http://10.10.10.10:8000/debian.nb and it would get forwarded to the
appropriate Debian server.