[PLUG] Freedos and Linux tftp servers...

Daniel Johnson teknotus at gmail.com
Sat Oct 17 02:13:16 UTC 2009


On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 5:18 PM, Michael Robinson
<plug_1 at robinson-west.com> wrote:
> I have a Linux based tftp server and I've been creating
> bootable freedos disk images.  Unfortunately, I'm limited
> to a 2.88 meg image.  Is there any simple way to break
> that limit?  Some programs I'd like to run via network
> boot such as Battle Tech II demand an actual hard drive,
> groan.

Well it needs to at least think that it has a hard drive. Have you
tried dosbox, or DosEmu, or something like a KVM virtual machine.

[snip]

> So in theory, one can network boot and back up via network
> their Linux system.

Have you tried the eitherboot project.  They have demonstrated booting
almost every Microsoft OS via the network.  I've even witnessed a
netbook being booted via WPA encrypted wifi.  It may be able to make
the system think it is acessing a local hard drive, but it is actually
a network block device.

> Sadly, the freedos project is stalled
> and there seems to be no effort to produce open source high
> quality network card drivers.

Dos never had a standard TCP/IP stack.  You had to use 3rd party
software to get TCP/IP before windows 95.

> In some ways I wonder if a network booted console only Linux
> system would be more useful.  I would like to know what to
> replace the init scripts with as leaving them the same when
> you are network booting doesn't make sense.  The typical
> scripts assume that there is a hard disk.

Fortunately the unix model is to have mount points, so what specific
filesystem, or block device doesn't matter once it is mounted.  The
tricky part as I remember it is getting it to mount the root
filesystem.  /etc/fstab will need to have the network filesystem, or
block device in it, and you might need to have pivot root someplace in
the init to switch to the network filesytem once it is mounted.

> Does anyone know of a really fancy way to pick from multiple
> network boot images at network boot time?

I believe it is part of the PXE standard to be able to select what
image to boot.  The config is a bit trickier.



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