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Hi,
I am not a low-level hardware guru (or even any other kind of
guru as a matter of fact) so all this may be completely crap...
but bear with me:
How hard would it be for grub to display it's boot menu over
ethernet to a pre-configured IP address ( or maybe even to a
preconfigured MAC address if it's easier) and port number.
Basically I want exactly what LILO offers over a serial line (and
I know Grub is planning to offer this over a serial line in the
future too...) but making it available over ethernet would be an
answer to the prayers of a lot of people... including myself.
Grub seems to be a good candidate because it already includes
networking support through it's netboot options and it's
developers seem to have ambitions to develop it into a complete
mini OS of sorts in the future.
Basically what I am doing is this: I have a cluster of machines
on which I have to do some kernel level development (in Linux).
This would possibly include uploading a newly changed kernel on
all the machines on the cluster and rebooting all of them
together. And if the new kernel fails to boot, I'd have to
somehow tell the machines to reboot to a safe kernel. I have one
stable machine on the network on which no changes are performed.
So... I'd like to to able to put grub on all the machines. All
machines would boot to stage1 and direct their grub shell prompts
to my stable machine over the network from where I can direct it
to boot any file I want. You can imagine what a powerful tool
this feature (combined with Wake On LAN features of modern
ethernet cards) would be for anybody running or administering a
big cluster of machines running whatever Operating system.
So is it possible? If yes, how easy or hard it would be to do.
I am fully prepared to study the issue and try to hack it myself
with some guidance as I think this has the potential to make PC
bootup process at par or maybe even more advanced than the big
expensive Unix machines (I have some experience with sparc 10
machines and I know they can't do this) Once again, if my
ignorance is shining through this entire message, please let me
know.
Thanks a lot
Chetan Ahuja
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