[PLUG] Nic built into D845PEBT2...

[lbrigman at fcpa.fujitsu.com]

on 08/14/03 @ 08:45PM said:
>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.

If you are just wanting to get network booting up and running quickly
then I recommend using either
bpbatch  www.bpbatch.org
or
pxelinux  http://syslinux.zytor.com/

If your booting from linux and deal with the requirments for pxelinux,
then pxelinux allows multiple packages to be downloaded and extracted.

>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?

Not necessarly.  Solaris at one time had default network boot with NFS
mounting but the swap space was the local drive.  You will have to
figure out if the motherboard can make network booting priority ahead
of a local hard drive.  Sometimes this can be a pain.

>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?

Yes initrd is a initial ramdisk.
No, your not limited to 4megs compressed.  Just pass the command-line
arg to the kernel
"ramdisk_size=size_in_kbytes"
Part if the initrd is a file "/linuxrc" which is dependent on the image
being built.  It is the place that you do any and all of the setup and
configuration of the system.

A good reference for initrd stuff is the kernel docs,
[KERNEL_PREFIX]/Documentations/initrd.txt

>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.

If you have the kernel setup for different nics either built-in to the
kernel or
loaded as modules then you can use the same root filesystem for all
machines.

----
Larry Brigman
Fujitsu Computer Products of America
503.693.2051 lbrigman at fcpa.fujitsu.com
Coins 87-7935-2051