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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!samsung!nighthawk.clearpoint.com!transfer!m2c!nic.umass.edu!caen!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!usc!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!gatech!bloom-beacon!eru.mt.luth.se!lunic!sunic!mcsun!sun4nl!tuegate.tue.nl!svin02!wzv!rob From: rob@wzv.win.tue.nl (Rob J. Nauta) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Boot 386BSD over the Internet! Message-ID: <3689@wzv.win.tue.nl> Date: 2 Aug 92 10:08:08 GMT References: <712592771snx@crynwr.com> Organization: Sex, UNIX & Rock 'n Roll Lines: 25 nelson@crynwr.com (Russell Nelson) writes: >Here's an interesting idea: Make a boot disk that has Ethernet >drivers for most popular boards. It should autodetect to see what >the board and its parameters are. Include TCP/IP support in that >kernel. After the kernel starts up, it goes to a particular site (or >set of sites, maybe pinging them to find the closest/least loaded) >and starts FTPing the rest of the distribution onto the hard disk. Nice idea, but not really useable. To be able to ftp the rest of the distribution you first need to allocate an IP number within the local network. So automatical loading upon first boot is a little difficult. Another idea might be to add to the kernel some kind of diskless booting like SUNS's do it, with a bootparam RPC call for root and swap, tftp'ing the kernel. This way you can run 386BSD on your PC without reformatting the harddisk, by booting from a file server, ideal if you have a network already. Rob -- /-----------------------------------------------\ ,==. | Rob J. Nauta, UNIX computer security expert. | /@ | | rob@wzv.win.tue.nl, Phone: +31-40-837549 | /_ < | Feel free to email me for free advice | =" `g'