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>
6e56beb6d2