These are a selection of small problems and annoyances with the netboot

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>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions