[LispM-Hackers] FYI regarding x86 pc and etherboot

[John Morrison]

Hi;

I find it extremely ironic that getting this to work highlighted some
of the shortcomings (to my mind) of UNIX.

As I explained earlier, I needed to use "vendor options" in the DHCP
dialog.

Thus, I needed to upgrade my dhcp from 2.x to 3.x because 2.x didn't
support it..

Thus, I needed to rebuild my Linux kernel (I am not making this up)
because, as "stock" configured from kernel.org it did not have the IP
stack set with the options the DHCP daemon needed (?!!?!?!).  (And,
yes, I know it's from kernel.org and not redhat.com because I already
had to rebuild the kernel once to support at 137GB+ disk!)

Sheesh.

Anyways: be advised that if you are adventurous and want to work on
the bare iron port, then:

(1) You are almost certain to need to upgrade your dhcpd.

(2) You are almost certain to need to rebuild your Linux kernel.

(3) You will need to create a dhcpd.conf file that does some magic.
If you can figure this one out on your own, then you are a better man
than I.  That may be true anyway, but if you can, I won't dispute the
point.

(4) You will need to remove the "-s" flag from your /etc/xinetd.d/tftp
config file in order to put the "real" pathname of the
to-be-downloaded file in dhcpd.conf.

I actually booted an Java Operating System binary I just built -- it
includes a 9MB image (because it had to include a ramdisk classpath
zipfile), and it booted fairly quickly (matter of seconds to download
-- it took longer to boot all 36KB of etherboot off the floppy!).

Is anybody planning on helping with the bare iron version?  If so, I
can knock together some HTML documentation (it'll be ugly, but it'll
be there).  If not, I'd just as soon let these emails constitute the
documentation.

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