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. 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. 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. >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. 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. Regards, Marty --- Try: http://rom-o-matic.net/ to make Etherboot images instantly. Name: Marty Connor US Mail: Entity Cyber, Inc.; P.O. Box 391827; Cambridge, MA 02139; USA Voice: (617) 491-6935, Fax: (617) 491-7046 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.thinguin.org/ _____________________________________________________________________ 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
