[LispM-Hackers] FYI regarding x86 pc and etherboot

[James A. Crippen]

John Morrison <jm@mak.mak.com> writes:

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

Well, at least you can complain about it to people who will be
sympathetic.  And won't bombard you with flamage about how Macs and
WinDOS are better.

> 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!)

Duh.  Duh, duh, duh.

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

Do you recall exactly what funny options that dhcpd needed to be on
in order for vendor options to work correctly?

> (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.

That's what you get for using the 'improved' inetd.  I like the old
fashioned one just fine.  I consider it the service's problem to
handle security -- inetd should just spawn processes and do nothing
else.

> 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!).

That would figure...  The IBM PC floppy disk (and in relation, the
Macintosh firmy and the Sun firmy) still has the same bandwidth and
transfer rate that it did back in 1982 or whenever.  The interface and
protocol haven't changed a bit since then.  Only the mechanicals and
media themselves have gotten better.

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james@unlambda.com> ,-./-.  Anchorage, Alaska,
Lambda Unlimited: Recursion 'R' Us   |  |/  | USA, 61.20939N, -149.767W
Y = \f.(\x.f(xx)) (\x.f(xx))         |  |\  | Earth, Sol System,
Y(F) = F(Y(F))                        \_,-_/  Milky Way.