[PLUG] Nic built into D845PEBT2...

Michael C. Robinson michael at goose.robinson-west.com
Thu Aug 14 20:47:02 UTC 2003


I've been trying to set up a network distributed dos system via netboot
with tcp/ip support using msclient.  Anyone know what driver to use for
the nic built into this motherboard and where to get it?  I use this
to access cabs and have played some dos games over network as well.

I'm hoping to use a network booted OS for backup and restoration.
Norton Ghost doesn't work worth a darn for this use.  Netbooted dos
won't work for post Windows 3.11 systems or Linux as it can't read the
partitions.  A netbooted Linux system that runs within say a 16 meg
ramdisk might do the trick though.  What accounts do you need though 
in this system?  What programs do you need remote filesystems for to
stay within 16 megs?   If you boot NFS root does that mean that you
don't have devices to access local hard drives on your machine?

An initrd is an initial ramdisk?  Is there a size limitation on 
this of 4 megs compressed?  If so, how can I create a small ramdisk
based system that creates a larger ramdisk, copies say a sixteen meg 
image to it, and then chroots to that to get around this problem? 
Probably the only thing that needs to persist is the dump space 
and swap space unlike a hard disk installed Linux system where /tmp 
and /var along with /usr and / have to persist after shutdown.  I
guess home should be mounted off of the server though does it have
to be?  Should this system NIS authenticate?  Do I want to use
Amanda?  

Traditionally, modules.conf is unique for machine A that has nic A
verses machine B that has nic B.  I want to have my Linux system work
equally well for machine A and machine B though.  I could create darn
near two exact copies of the same compressed root filesystem for A and
B, but that seems wasteful.  The latter is what I'm doing with msclient
dos disk images to support all the different nics.  The latter is 
reasonable because I have to change more than one file 
since I'm stuck with static ip assignment, a shortcoming of 
running a network over the same media as another one that 
has a dhcp server for the same workstations/terminals.

     --  Michael C. Robinson




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