... memdisk : mostly solved

[Steffen Grunewald]

On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 04:13:18PM +0200, Steffen Grunewald wrote:
> 
> While I am here: I'm looking into memdisk to do automated BIOS updates.
> Is there a simple way to tell the server(s) to remove the PXE link
> when done? (I could imagine to try to TFTP a file that isn't there,
> and watch the messages for this particular error, then translate the
> IP to hex notation and pick the file below pxelinux.cfg - a hack but
> one that has been working with our RedHat cluster for ages)

I think I found something that's acceptable enough (considered that it's
a DOS solution).
I built a disk image (*) that contains the flash utility and some other
goodies, and put some old DOS-based TCP-IP stack on it (Pathway Access,
do you remember it?) The hardest part was to find a NDIS driver for the
EEpro/100 card (and find out that it's NDIS2 so it needs a different
protocol manager). It even does bootp to get its own IP address (have
to figure how to read it since there's no i[fp]config), and it can tftp
to a broadcast address! (now the only thing I have to run on the server
is a small perl script that watches over the syslog and converts the
failed tftp RRQ into something clever: one could even think about a
hierarchy of pxe configurations, processed one after the other!)

memdisk is great.

Proof of concept being done, I'm starting to get lazy again :-)


Cheers,
 Steffen


(*) How to create a bootable 2.88 MB floppy image? 1.44 MB is a bit small
if I want to put several flash images into it

-- 
Steffen Grunewald * MPI fuer Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut)
SciencePark Golm, Am Mühlenberg 1, D-14476 Potsdam * http://www.aei.mpg.de
* e-mail: steffen.grunewald(*)aei.mpg.de * +49-331-567-{fon:7233,fax:7298}
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