BIOS

[Henning Fehrmann]

Hello,
> 
> This IMHO could be done without touching a real disk's MBR using a file (untested).

Copying the MBR was basically the first method which worked.
According to the docu of memdisk, if you want to use arbitrary image
sizes, it has to be hd image with mbr and partition table.
>
> 
> IIRC loopback mount has an option to skip to an offset inside the image... man mount
>
Works fine, thanx.
mount  -o loop,blocksize=512,offset=32256 hd.img /mnt/dos
>
> > 
> >     * WATT-32 (TCP/IP stack for DOS) http://www.bgnett.no/~giva/ 
> 
> Is there a binary version I have missed when I last looked?
>
We just build every thing from scratch. I guess this is the standard
tcp/ip stack used for freedos.
>
> >     * card driver    http://www.georgpotthast.de/sioux/packet.htm
> 
> You might also use the UNDI driver that sits on top of the PXE in the card's firmware.
I will take a look.

> Of course that's a more elegant solution than having a fake TFTP request which would
> trigger an action on the server side. Why didn't you go for a simple rsh instead, which
> is already a prerequisite for FAI (writeback of install logs)?
> 
Unfortunately, the only rsh version I found was from drdos and not free.
> 
> If you don't mind I'd like to have a look at your image.
> I'd suggest to have 
> an interface to the possible tasks as clean as possible so that changes to
> the payload have to be done in only one place (our vendor for example uses
> a zip file that contains the payload, which is unpacked into a ramdisk, and
> it's setup.bat is started - this way the autoexec.bat stays unmodified if
> you replace the payload) - KISS :-)
> (My images are in CVS, faiconfig/files/boot/fai/floppy-images/)

Of course, but I will not attach it to this email, since it is compressed 13MB.
If it is in good shape (without a private sshkey), I will put it on a server and make a deb package
out of it. Is somebody of the FAI developer team interested?

Regards
Henning