I think it would be really cool if someone would add a feature to disk 1 to become a PXE install server. It should be fairly straight forward other then dealing with sysinstall.
I presume the above means a PXE *client*. This would be cool, but by no means trivial. I looked at this in the past when I wanted to network boot FreeBSD on a couple of machines that did not support a boot ROM and reached a dead end; I ended up using PicoBSD and NFS-mounting most of the stuff.
Following Brook's suggestion, I looked around to see how difficult a PXE client project would be. Here are some bullets and pointers:
- What we would need is a PXE emulator. PXE stands for Portable Execution *Environment*, and it really does supply a (primitive) but not trivial environment used to bootstrap the code.
- Microsoft supplies with its Remote Installation Server (RIS) a program (rbfg.exe) that creates such an emulation floppy. This PXE emulator only supports PCI cards. See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=242920
- Apparently the same product, but with additional functionality, is sold by Argon Technologies. See http://www.argontechnology.com/rbfg/index.shtml
- An open-source project called pxe-toolkit aimed at providing examples of PXE client and server code. The project seems to have dissappeared from the face of the earth. Its homepage on freshmeat and a download page on savannah are dead; a page with links on http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pxe-toolkit does not contain any useful pointers.
- The PXE specification (2.1) is freely available from Intel in PDF format (500K, 103 pages). See ftp://download.intel.com/labs/manage/wfm/download/pxespec.pdf
- Implementing a PXE client from scratch is obviously doable, but not trivial. One problem is that the API is 16-bit, so we would have to use 16-bit development tools, libraries, and an execution environment. The client should support a DHCP client, preboot functionality, and an API. The API consists of 37 relatively high-level functions providing TFTP, UDP, and UNDI (Universal Network Driver Interface) functionality. Here is a list to give you a rough idea of the functionality that has to be provided:
UNLOAD_STACK, GET_CACHED_INFO, RESTART_TFTP, START_UNDI, STOP_UNDI, START_BASE, STOP_BASE, TFTP_OPEN, TFTP_CLOSE, TFTP_READ, TFTP_READ_FILE, TFTP_GET_FSIZE, UDP_OPEN, UDP_CLOSE, UDP_WRITE, UDP_READ, UNDI_STARTUP, UNDI_CLEANUP, UNDI_INITIALIZE, UNDI_RESET_ADAPTER, UNDI_SHUTDOWN, UNDI_OPEN, UNDI_CLOSE, UNDI_TRANSMIT, UNDI_SET_MCAST_ADDRESS, UNDI_SET_STATION_ADDRESS, UNDI_SET_PACKET_FILTER, UNDI_GET_INFORMATION, UNDI_GET_STATISTICS, UNDI_CLEAR_STATISTICS, UNDI_INITIATE_DIAGS, UNDI_FORCE_INTERRUPT, UNDI_GET_MCAST_ADDRESS, UNDI_GET_NIC_TYPE, UNDI_GET_IFACE_INFO, UNDI_GET_STATE, UNDI_ISR.
I hope this information helps if anyone wants to take it up from here.
Diomidis -- Diomidis Spinellis Assistant Professor Department of Management Science and Technology (DMST) Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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