Boot from EEPROM @ PCI-Card --> Boot from DHCPD/BOOTPD via Linux

[Daniel Schwager]

Hi together,

we have got some ISA-Card with only one EPROM on it.
If we plug-in this ISA-Card in a PC, the PC "converted" itself
to an X-Terminal. This meens, the whole X-Terminal software
is in this EEPROM - nothing else is important on the ISA-Card.

So, is there a way, if we store the content of the
X-Terminal EEPROM to the filesystem of a Linux server, to modify the
EEPROM-image in this way, that we can execute this on a Client PC
booting this modified image via a bootable NIC and a serverbased
DHCP-Daemon / BOOTP-Daemon ?

If this would be possible, we are able to remove all the
ISA-X-Terminal Cards an replace them with bootable NIC's
connected to the Linux-Server.

From the BIOS/EEPROM integration i know the following:

-----------------------------------------------------------

offset
00h WORD AA55h - ROM signature
02h BYTE ??h - Size of ROM image in 512 byte blocks
03h 3 BYTEs - Initialization procedure; called FAR by
the BIOS. Use RETF to return

-----------------------------------------------------------

Could somebody help me or give me same tipps ?

regards

Danny



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[Matt H]

On Wed, 02 Jul 2003 18:13:50 +0200,
Daniel Schwager <Daniel.Schwager@dtnet.de> wrote: Hi together, we have got some ISA-Card with only one EPROM on it. If we plug-in this ISA-Card in a PC, the PC "converted" itself to an X-Terminal. This meens, the whole X-Terminal software is in this EEPROM - nothing else is important on the ISA-Card.

You probably want the Linux Terminal Server Project at
http://www.ltsp.org

[erik de wild]

I'm not sure that I give you an answer to your question. I have 6 used
pc for testing. I have tried clusterknoppix, a linux distribution
based on debian. You can boot it from cd-rom and start a terminal
server or an openmosix server. With the terminal server started and
the clientbios set on pxe boot you can boot from the server. It works
very easy.

boot server-pc from the cd
configure and start the terminal server (see submenu of KNOPPIX)
connect de pc's
configure bios of client-pc and use pxe as first bootmethod

and see what happens.

The openmosix server is realy amazing. There seems to be a little
error. After configuring the server it does not start so you have to
start it manualy. When you connect one or more pc's and boot with pxe
you have a real cluster. processes on one pc will migrate to the
other. You can monitor this with mosixview.

Clusterknoppix is an easy and save way to studie the concept of
terminal servers and thin clients.

With friendly regards


Erik de Wild

[Tauno Voipio]

"Daniel Schwager" <Daniel.Schwager@dtnet.de> wrote in message
news:3F0304BE.7FD2FE66@dtnet.de... Hi together, we have got some ISA-Card with only one EPROM on it. If we plug-in this ISA-Card in a PC, the PC "converted" itself to an X-Terminal. This meens, the whole X-Terminal software is in this EEPROM - nothing else is important on the ISA-Card.

Very probably the EPROM just contains the stuff for net-booting the
X-terminal. A full X server is far too large to be squeezed into an EPROM.

You can verify the situation by tracing the start-up of the X terminal with
e.g. Ethereal or tcpdump.

For more information, see the Diskless-HOWTO.

HTH

Tauno Voipio
tauno voipio @ iki fi