🚀 go-pugleaf

John Chapple wrote in message ...
>In article <80m04m$cen$1@reef.news.technocom.net>, Philip Bragg
><philb@vossnet.co.uk> writes
>>A few weeks ago I bought a non-bootable �25 inc vat "Iwill 2903" which is
>>basically an Advansys ABP-940 without the boot ROM and the settings
storage
>>EEPROM on board. I'm fairly good with a soldering iron, so I soldered a
DIL
>>socket into the vacant space on the board which looked as though it should
>>have the boot ROM on it, then I used my Black and Decker paint stripping
>>heat gun to remove the EEPROM from an old 3com ethernet card (most NICs
have
>>EEPROMs on them,
>
>Do you mean as in bootable eeproms? I wish you'd show me where I'm after
>one of those (actually for a 3com card) I've always looked at computer
>fairs etc, I've *never* seen *one*.

No, I mean the 93Cx6 serial EEPROM, an 8 legged device which stores settings
and presumably the MAC address too. If you want to boot of an EPROM in the
boot-ROM socket of your Ethernet card I suggest you take a look at the
etherboot project. Unarchive it, type "make" and it builds ROM images for
all the popular NICs. Then all you need to do is run a few scripts (which
are strangely located in the documentation folder) install DHCP server,
duplicate your root FS and compile a kernel which supports "kernel
configured networking".
The documentation is extremely good.


oh, you also have to program up the EPROM which will require an EPROM
programmer (100 quid from Maplin I think).

I do have a diskless workstation which boots this way, using a 3com 3c509
10mbps card(you might have to run the 3c5x9cfg program in DOS to enable the
boot ROM socket). Simply power the machine up, it does the POST then jumps
into the Etherboot loader, which then BOOTP/TFTPs a kernel image from the
server, runs it, mounts the root FS using NFS, gets itself an IP again (the
first one was just for grabbing the kernel). Runs init and hey presto, I
have a login: on the screen.

The machine I use as a workstation is a 96M RAM P133 with integrated SB16
and Mach64 video (I use a matrox millenium though). I haven't needed swap
yet, but I gather you can swap over NFS. The odd thing is it boots from
power on to a WDM login screen (its like XDM but for WindowMaker) in under a
minute, which is faster than it would if it had some kind of IDE disk I'm
sure. The POST takes 25 seconds of that minute.

I've got a "proper" commercial boot ROM for the 3C509 here, but it's not
mine and you're not sposed to copy commercial soft/firmware. It says its
"bootware" from "lanworks technology" who I believe have been bought by 3com
now. You can use these chips to boot using Novell's boot service or Remote
Boot in NT4.0, I have a 3com 3station (a diskless 286) which uses this kind
of boot method, not really that exciting...Its called RPL and the acronym
means different things to different vendors so don't expect it to be simple
unless you know you're dealing with Novell RPL, which is simple... I'm told
<G>

Have a look at the etherboot project anyway...

http://www.slug.org.au/etherboot/

-phil