Re: [Etherboot-developers] Re: TCP and HTTP support

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

"Timothy Legge" <tl...@ro...> writes:

> > implementation of multicast).  That alternative is to build a tree
> > of machines where the root only transmits the image to some of them.
> 
> As I was working on tftm it crossed my mind that EB might be able to
> transmit a received packet to another multicast address as it is
> received.  However since the NICs are not filtering the addresses, it
> would probably just add clutter to the network.

Right.  With multicast at the IP level all you need on the large scale
are multicast routers.  Nothing else should need to manually distribute
multicast packets except the transmitter.

And no machine actually owns multicast packets so that does not help much
either.  If you are on a good switch it will snoop the IGMP traffic and only
those ports that need it will get the multicast traffic.

> > novel use of http support.  As a machine comes up it can temporarily
> > be an http cache for a particular boot file.
> 
> But could it finish transmitting it before the loaded boot file takes
> over?

What beoboot (my inspiration) does is to have the boot client hang
around for a while and work as a sever.  After that point is up
and all connections are closed it will actually boot up.  But it uses
a very home grown protocol.   Which is fine, but I would love
to find a way to do that with a standard protocol.

Eric