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Network Boot ROMs

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by guruofdos 1 view

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Prolific today, aren't I?!! Making up for lost time you see!

Question or discussion topic:

I look at a typical NIC, and see an empty socket to take a ROM (eeprom/eprom/prom...whatever) which I am told is a network boot rom. I've never actually SEEN a ROM fitted to an NIC before. I did look on the Surecom website the other day and they have ROM images for download, which I could (should I so desire) program into a 27C EPROM and make my own.

What does one of these DO?!!! I have also seen Network Boot as a BIOS option and have heard of 'diskless' workstations, but I have never seen a satisfactory explanation or description of the workings of this. Suggestions welcome.

I'm assuming (pardon my ignorance) that these ROM's perform some kind of 'bootstrap' during post that then set up network protocols on the card and attempt somekind of communication with another device (server?) on the network. How?

To expand on this, most NIC's plug into a PCI bus...would it not then make sense to have some kind of ROM 'on-board' anyway which then removes the need to have drivers for the NIC and software for protocols (TCP/IP, NetBEUI, IPX, etc.). Nothing worse than having to scour for a driver disk for that odd NIC you found sculling around and want to use. Of course, Linux/Unix and Windows would require different versions of this 'firmware' but that's not a major problem...for a few cents more, have twice the size of ROM and have both sets of code embedded...switch or link for Win or Lin.

Graphics cards have the 'videobios' embedded in ROM and this works well enough on a PCI or AGP bus, so why can't this be expanded to include drivers as well as just firmware...you'd never have to hunt for the cd again when you reformat.

Anyway, back to NIC's and ROM's. I can bypass a hard disk by booting from a floppy. What do I achieve by bypassing my disk system altogether. Can I actually have a 'Windows' machine with no moving parts, i.e. NO DRIVES WHATSOEVER?? What do I need on my network to allow me to run a diskless workstation, 'booting' from the network? How do you configure one!!!

I have actually written various .com files in assembler, stored them in ROM and plugged them into one of these cards. By knowing where the memory address range is you can write your own ROM routines for any purpose you like and then call them with far calls from other code....like TSR's only more permanent!!!

4 replies

by mrafrohead

You're right on the nose. A box with no HD...

It would run right off the network server.

You turn on the machine, the bootstrap loader runs the commands for the NIC and it talks back and forth with the server and just displays what you need to see. You can work within it and do what you will, and the server sends you all of the information, instead of your hard drives.

From what I read a while back, that's what MS intends to do in the future... There will be no more installling your software. You will just lease space on their servers, connect your dummy terminal to the internet and it will just run what ever you paid for with MS...

In theory, sounds like a neat idea. No more worrying about crashes and all of that. And for them, they are guaranteed to get paid for what they say you owe, it would help eliminate piracy.

But there's a snowballs chance in hell, that I would EVER put my personal information (docs, pics, etc...) on a freakin MS server... They can't get their own systems safe, let alone write good secure software, so IMO that is just out the door.

I have two computers at home that have this feature enabled. When I get home, if I don't forget, I will take a couple of snapshots of the boot screen so you can see what I'm talkinga bout. It's really nothing fancy at all, but it's wierd. :)

To do it, you will need a server configured to run all of the stuff for you, though how to set it up, or what you would need. I haven't the foggiest idea. I just learned that you COULD do that not too long ago. I figure it'll be a while before I learn HOW to do it... ;p

As for coding these things... That I dunno, I can't write code to save my life, unless it's a bat file to make my games play on old Win3.1 systems...

Mrafrohead

by oldefar

We used to this with controllers (pre-SNA) and then again with the early engineering stations (when they were among the first on LAN segments). Are vampire taps going to make a comeback too??

I believe Dell is focusing heavily on flash cards next, and I can envision a flash with an OS and application on board. Workstation goes back to terminal with a plugin. Users can carry their needs in their pocket and use it on any terminal or PDA.

by hal 9000

They used to be popular when PROM burners where all the rage but I haven't seen anyone advertise a PROM burner for quite some time now either.

I think it was back in the 386/486 days that these things where popular.

But then again I have a IDE PCI card here with the socket for a PROM on it and it is the same as a Promise technology IDE 133 PCI card but it has the PROM they even have the same Circuit board numbers and the only difference is the EPROM.

Col

by guruofdos

can I find some more info peoples?!!!

Scenario. If my Win98 box accepts my login, and I have a Cat5 cable connected to my other Win98 box, I can then see 'shares' in my Network Neighbourhood.

So, if the NIC is booting from ROM, I have no 'local' copy of Windows but I still have a shared folder on my other machine, right? What do I need to 'see' this shared folder as a 'C' drive on my NIC boot machine?

This scenario is similar to using MSCDEX and a .sys file to access a CD drive from a DOS boot disk. If I have a CD drive in a machine, but no hard disk, I can access the CD using a Windows 98 boot floppy, even though I can't run an OS from the CD as it is read-only. My basic 'DOS' command interpreter is in memory and I can access my files on CD.

What I want to do is share a folder on the other machine which effectively 'acts' as a 'c' drive to all intents and purposes. What I don't want to do is purchase 'server' software and operate the diskless workstation as a 'thin client' (is that the term?). I simply want to put one big hard disk in a powerful machine and access a folder or partition on the diskless workstation AS IF IT WERE A LOCAL 'C' drive.

Why you ask?!! Well, I still need a couple of machines for DOS6.22 and some dos-based apps. The apps will simply not run under 95, 98 or XP and if I put a new hard disk in a 'dos' machine, I get an awful lot of 2.1Gb partitions! I have some old 486's which run my software perfectly well, and having booted to DOS via a network, most of the stuff will work happily with a RAM disk, so network speed is NOT an issue once booted. I COULD do what I want from floppy, but the data files that the program creates and uses would mean an awful lot of floppies and a network share would be better for storage and I want a diskless workstation so I can build it into a box and bury it in the floor with no access to a disk drive!!!

If someone 'in the know' could point me in the right direction, it would be muchly appreciated.

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