code. Apart from the first one, none really affect typical configurations
but are nevertheless unnecessary limitations. We use netbooted PCs as
student X-terminals and all of the below fixes have been useful. Apologies
for including them all in one PR, but some are just too silly or trivial
to send on their own!
a) Newer SMC cards have hardware addresses starting with 00:E0.
Netboot compares the MAC address with 00:00:C0 to determine
if it is a WD/SMC card, so it fails to detect these.
b) Netboot is unable to boot kzipped kernels, as it assumes that
the kernel load address is 0x100000.
c) Users can abort the booting process and enter arbitrary network
addresses, or boot from a floppy disk. This can be a problem when
netbooted machines are used in a student environment.
d) It is not possible to set all options via bootp. For example there
is no way to remotely force a client to boot from disk. With both
SECURE_BOOT(patch below) and NO_TFTP defined, short of unplugging
the eprom there is no way at all to get the client to boot locally.
A generic solution is to allow complete netboot commands to be sent
using bootp lines such as:
:T132="diskboot":
e) The last character of netboot command names is not checked. You
can type 'iz 10.0.0.1' and it will be interpreted as 'ip'. This
is only important if you try to add a new command which is the
same as an existing one except for the last character.
f) We have a configuration where multiple servers are willing to serve
a diskless client. The tftp config file, or the bootptab entry on
each server must specify the root and swap filesystems as 'ip:/fs'
even though 'ip' will usually be the responding server's IP address.
It would be nice if netboot could automatically prepend the server's
IP address to an entry specified as just '/fs', so that multiple
servers can use the same tftp or bootp configuration files. Admittedly
this is hardly a major problem!
PR: 7098
Submitted by: Ian Dowse <iedowse@maths.tcd.ie>
- TFTP is not needed any longer.
Add some other improvements:
- swapsize is now detected if no value was specified.
- resvport is used by default
- merged code for setting/showing mount options for root/swap.
Submitted by: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
Subject: Mea culpa -- small fix for netboot fixes
In accordance with the unavoidable principle sof Murphy's Law, I discovered
that the fixes I recently contributed for the netboot code had some small
flaws in them. Two of them were just typos and had no effect on how the
program functioned. The other one was a missing line from the rootopts and
swapopts functions I created in bootmenu.c, which was supposed to initialize
the NFS sotype flag. It defaults to UDP, and you can change it to TCP with
the rootopts or swapopts commands, but then you can't change it back again.
I originally had a line at the top of each function to reinitialize this
flag, but somehow it got lost in the shuffle, probably because I don't
actually have a need for that flag yet.
Submitted by: wpaul
Smack the netboot program around so that it will allow the user to
specify mount options. [So that you can boot from a privileged port]
Change the default boot image name in netboot to /kernel, then strip
the leading slash when actually going out to get the NFS file handle.
Added support for 3Com 3c503 cards. Also added another command to
the (trans) that allows you to switch the 3Com's on-board transceiver
on and off. (ether.c, ether.h, bootmenu.c)
Modified the Makefile to support new compile-time options for 3c503
cards:
-DINCLUDE_3COM Include support for 3c503
-D_3COM_BASE=0x300 Define 3c503 base i/o address (if not
specified, 0x300 is the default)
-D_3COM_USE_AUI Disable the 3c503's transceiver by
default (without this flag the transceiver
is on by default)
I have put it here, because I belive we could share some code among the
various kinds of boot-code, whenever we get the time to look at it.
Submitted by: Martin Renters
