----- Original Message ----- From: "Marty Connor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "LTSP Discussion List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2001 6:47 PM Subject: Rye: [Ltsp-discuss] PXE and LTSP
> On 11/22/2001 2:19 PM Conrad Lawes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >The Pre-boot eXecution Environment (PXE) protocol is becoming the defacto > >standard for network booting today. > > Conrad, please identify yourself as an employee (or recent former > employee) of a company that makes commercial PXE code when you are making > statements supporting technology that your employers sell. > My statement regarding PXE has nothing to do with my employer. It was not intended to endorse any product my employer is selling. The PXE SDK is owned by Intel (not my employer) and is free to anyone who wishes to develop a PXE client or server. In fact, if you read my comments carefully you should gather that I am informing the public that they don't need to purchase or burn boot ROMs if they own computers that are fully WfM-compliant. > In previous postings your address has been either "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" > or "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". 3Com sells relatively expensive NIC cards > that happen to have LanWorks (http://www.lanworks.com/) closed-source, > proprietary PXE code burned into them. Again, there is no need to purchase a boot ROM if the computer is fully WfM-compliant - nothing to buy from 3Com or Lanworks. > The statements in your message may be your opinions, but readers should > know that they also are probably also the opinions of the people who pay > your salary. > > As an Etherboot developer and creator of ROM-o-matic.net, I'd like to > respond to some of the points you have raised. > > >Most, if not all, corporate desktops purchased today are Wired for > >Management (WfM) compliant. This normally means that the computer is > >equipped with a BIOS-integrated PXE boot agent. However, the PXE boot > >agent may also be onboard the network adapter. Having WfM-compliant > >PCs makes it easy for network administrators to implement LTS, since the > >client PCs now have all the components required for network booting. > > That statement is misleading. "Corporate Desktops" is not defined. Most > computers in schools and small businesses are compatible with WfM > perhaps, but only to the extent that they can do "Wake on LAN", NOT that > they have PXE in their BIOSes, unless they have an integrated Intel > EEPRO100 or 3Com 3C905C-TXM on the motherboard. The cost of those NICs > makes them too expensive for a lot of situations where people might want > to use LTSP. While some low-cost workstations incorporate PXE into their > BIOS, a quick trip to your local computer store will show that most NICs > and motherboards do not have PXE code in them. Point taken. My definition of a corporate desktop is a WfM-compliant computer that is Wake-On-LAN and PXE-capable out-of-the-box. Business desktops sold by the likes of IBM, Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc would fit this definition. > >This also removes rom-o-matic and etherboot mknbi > >from the LTS picture. > > Ouch. Your suggestion seems to be that it would be better, in all cases, > to use a proprietary, expensive, closed source solution to boot Open > Source LTSP workstations. This seems a bit strange. Again, you are missing the point of my original comment. There is no need to tag the linux kernel using the Etherboot mknbi utility if you are using PXE. In fact, doing so would cause network boot to fail. Furthermore, there is no need to use the 3Com/Lanworks' imggen utility if you are using PXE. PXELinux eliminates the need for mknbi and imggen. The point of my comment was simply to point out that if one has PXE-equipped computers there is no need for Etherboot or ROM-o-matic, eliminating the need for extra configuration at the client side. The end result is easier implementation of LTS since the sysadmin only has to worry about configuring the server. > Why "remove" Etherboot from the picture, when Etherboot allows people to > network boot using inexpensive NICs from a wide variety of vendors? > Etherboot is a mature, supported, stable, inexpensive, Open Source > alternative to commercial PXE implementations such as the one your > company sells. > > ROM-o-matic.net has generated over 50,000 free, Open Source Etherboot > ROMs in just its first year of operation. This does not include all of > the downloads of the Etherboot package from which people have generated > ROMs. Etherboot has consistently been in the top 10% of sourceforge.net > projects. > > Perhaps in reality Etherboot is also becoming a defacto standard for > network booting workstations. Agreed. ROM-o-matic is definitely the way to go for anyone needing a free, open source network boot solution. However, like the Lanworks boot ROM, it is not required if one already has a computer with a PXE boot ROM onboard. _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.openprojects.net
