[Ltsp-discuss] StarTech ST100SW with bootrom, etherboot or RPL?

[Roy Souther]

I am looking at making a large purchase of NIC's. I am looking at the StarTech ST100SW that has a socket for a BOOTROM and wake on LAN. These cards are 10/100 PCI RTL8139's and only $10 each. I like RTL and have never had any problems with them.

My question is about the RPL. The StarTech.com BOOTROM100S chips they sell for this card is RPL. I have never used RPL before, I have never used a StarTech card before. When I look at the RTL8139 ROM's on http://rom-o-matic.net I see about a dozen different RTL8139 ROM's for different manufacturers. Does these mean I cannot use an EtherBoot ROM?
Does this mean I have to use an RPL BOOTROM? The pre-programmed RPL chips are only $7 each but if I can get away with using EtherBoot I would much rather that.

I installed the Debian rpld server on my test server and I have one other card from some other company that is suppose to use RPL but it does not boot. I don't know why. I don't know if I have my rpld setup right or not. I see that there is nothing in the LTSP lists about RPL. The only think I could find about it was that it is old and mostly not used any more.

Is anyone using these cards? What can you tell me about the bootroms?Is anyone using rpld? How well does it work compared to etherboot or PXE?

Royce Souther www.SiliconTao.com Let Open Source help your business move beyond. For security this message is digitally authenticated by GnuPG.

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