🚀 go-pugleaf

> 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>

I remember having to support RPL with DOS on Banyan networks years ago.
Bloody terrible  - when first issued it required 360K boot images and
was a nightmare to get working properly, particularly when using memory
managers on the same PC. A couple of customers tried it, but soon
abandoned it. It wasn't helped by Banyan continually changing the
specifications and utilities. Eventually Banyan themselves dropped the
product.

I had a lot more luck with etherboot - very simple and it seemed to
support almost any operating system combination. At the time I used a
SCO unix server for the tftp host, but Linux would have also been
suitable. Not too sure what happened after my research, but the customer
never put it into production.

-- 
Paul Grayson, Ripon, North Yorkshire, UK.

No Microsoft code was used in generating this message - can you say the
same?