Booting a machine over the network without pxe.

[Tim Kientzle]

Josef Karthauser wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience of booting a machine over the
> network, like pxeboot, but without running PXE on a network card.
> I imagine that it should be possible to load pxeboot at the boot:
> prompt and have everything just work.

pxeboot requires that you have a PXE BIOS available.
Loosely speaking, PXE is three different things:
  * A BIOS that provides basic network operations,
  * A "multicast" TFTP that is designed for rapidly
    network booting very large numbers of machines
    simultaneously.  (Few people use this; fewer
    people need it.)
  * A network boot model in which the PXE BIOS loads
    a "network boot loader" that then uses the PXE
    BIOS services to load and boot an OS kernel.

The network boot model for PXE closely mirrors the
traditional model for booting a PC from hard disk:
BIOS loads boot loader that uses BIOS services to load OS.

Note that without the PXE BIOS, the 'pxeboot' program
is useless, since it relies on the PXE BIOS services.
If you want to load the kernel over the network, you
need something that knows how to talk to your network adapter.
If it ain't in ROM, it has to come from somewhere else.

However, there is another approach.  You can do a
"partial netboot" by loading the kernel from disk
(maybe even a floppy?) and then doing a classic netboot
after that.  Just enable the BOOTP and BOOTP_NFSROOT options
in the kernel and load it from disk.  The rest is "just"
server configuration.  Hint: If you statically compile everything
necessary into your kernel, this is all much simpler.

Good luck,

Tim Kientzle