BIOS

[Mario Fetka]

Am Donnerstag, 9. August 2007 11:26:05 schrieb 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

we are using the mars-nwe (netware 3 simularor) with the pipe filesystem it is 
profiding
the great thing is there is a file in the netware share that is a script on 
the server witch will be exec with the infos written to it as parameter.
the bad thing is it requires ipx on the server activated.
also bad only the old 16bit client will work (drivers) with mars. 

wfg
Mario
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