BIOS

[Tim Cutts]

On 9 Aug 2007, at 10:03 am, Steffen Grunewald wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 09, 2007 at 10:42:41AM +0200, Thomas Lange wrote:
>>>>>>> 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.
>
> It worked here, but I think that's something Henning has got  
> running too.
> The problem is to tell the server to swap its PXE config file for  
> this particular
> machine *after* the flash has been completed but *before* rebooting  
> (automatically
> or by power cycle/IPMI reset). It'd be necessary to send some kind  
> of "signal"
> to the server (a dummy tftp request is what I've done in the past,  
> at least from
> a tomsrtbt image I used to perform some partitioning magic).  
> Therefore, it would
> be nice to have a network stack under freedos (which the BIOS flash  
> disks nowadays
> are based on).

RLX got around this with their blade deployment system in a very  
hacky way; the DOS image they used included the Windows for  
Workgroups TCP/IP stack, and therefore SMB support, and they used  
this to update a status file for the node being deployed back on the  
Control Tower DHCP server.  Nasty, but it worked.

Tim


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