[LispM-Hackers] In case anybody cares -- the saga of bare iron and Etherboot

[John Morrison]

Hi Guys;

Boy, Etherboot has come a long way since I last used it.

You can now use your *web* *browser* to get custom Etherboot ROMs (&
bootable floppy images, which are what I am using).  They build them
on the fly at your request!  There's even a web form that takes
options (and I needed one -- more below)!

I kid you not.  Neither am I am notI making this up.

Aim your favorite browser at: http://www.rom-o-matic.com/

It evens works through a junkbuster proxy by using URL "poisoning" or
rewriting or whatever you call it.  All you need to know is the
make/model of your ethernet card.

Hot damn.

So, now I should be able to type "make e3x86" (or whatever we decide
to call that particular build target however we decide to build it)
on my nice, comfy, Linux desktop, and then hit the reset button on the
target, and watch it load at 100Mb/sec.  (At least, this is what I
*used* to do, only at 10Mb/sec -- I replaced the old NIC with a
faster, 100Mb/sec one.)

For the morbidly curious: I'm on a firewalled LAN here.  Since
Etherboot wants to use DHCP and I already have a cheap,
non-configurable Netgear firewall, the one option I needed to use was
the "Vendor" option, so that I could tell the Etherboot image to
ignore any DHCP offer that didn't contain "Etherboot" in the reply.

BOOTP would have been another option, but it is s-o-o-o old, I
couldn't find either an installable RPM (yeah, so I'm lazy) or a
buildable source version.  The usual places (rpmfind, google) only
turned up Olde versions.

I will now reconfigure my Linux box to serve DHCP to this one MAC
address, and build the rest of Etherboot, and see if I can get
something running.  I know that I will have to resurrect some old C++
bootstrapping stuff I used on another project, and I suspect I will
have to make some wholesale changes to e3.  I'll let you know more
later.

-jm

-- 
==== John Morrison
==== MAK Technologies Inc.
==== 185 Alewife Brook Parkway, Cambridge, MA 02138
==== http://www.mak.com/
==== vox:617-876-8085 x115
==== fax:617-876-9208
==== jm@mak.com