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!!!
