[ILUG] (Q) Booting over LAN

[Proinnsias Breathnach]

On Mon, May 31, 2004 at 04:43:20PM +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I've decided to give you ILUG gurus a second chance.
> 
> You failed your first test, to explain why my SCSI machine
> (Asus P2B-LS) won't boot off the hard disk,
> although it boots off floppy and CD without problem.
> (The MBR seems OK, when I look at it with dd.)
> 
> Anyway, I noticed yesterday that one of the options
> offered by the BIOS is to boot from LAN,
> and I was wondering how this was accomplished.
> I tried setting it as the first option (LAN,C,A)
> but it didn't send out any Ethernet packets,
> and didn't seem to wait to get any either.
> The motherboard has built-in ethernet,
> 
> I await your words of wisdom.

Tim,
	Booting from LAN is usually acomplished in one of two ways ...
PXE or Etherboot ... essentially they send a request to a dhcp or bootp
server which supplies the address of a tftp (udp trivial file transfer
protocol) server and a filename to fetch from same.

This is effectively a kernel, which boots on the machine, and then
mounts root etc as necessary / as configured. 

A good example of this in use would be the LTSP www.ltsp.org

P
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