BIOS

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 09:37:02 +0200, Henning Fehrmann <henning.fehrmann at aei.mpg.de> said:

    > we are interested in flashing a BIOS image and in manipulating the NVRAM of the motherboard 
    > automatically.
Wow. Do you really need this?

    > Unfortunately, using certain vendors, the access to the NVRAM is not straightforward.
    > These vendors are offering DOS tools only, to write in the NVRAM, hence, we have to boot
    > a DOS image and here starts the trouble.
You can boot a DOS or floppy image using PXE. This is how a
pxelinux.cfg looks like for booting a floppy image: 

default dos
label dos
 kernel memdisk
 append keeppxe initrd=floppy.img

But AFAIR I had no success, because the dos flashing utilities seems
to wanna have a real floppy, not a fake of a floppy.


    > Optimally, using the DOS environment flashes the BIOS, sets the 
    > NVRAM and sends a message to the FAI server to prepare the next boot of the clients for the
    > installation.
You could send a message to the faimond which can change the pxelinux configuration.


    > In the worst case, the DOS environment is working autonomously and the FAI server is 'guessing'
    > whether the BIOS is flashed or not, e.g., by analyzing the DHCP logs, but this is not what we really want.

Guessing if something has changed could easily be done using dmidecode,
which will give you the version of the BIOS.

-- 
regards Thomas