got modified zipslack booting over nfs

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi all.

Well, it works. I am now able to boot my box without a hard drive over
nfs, using a slightly modified zipslack 9.0. It's kind of cool.

I think the coolest part is that I can simply flip the power switch on
the client, without worrying about shutting it down first. There is only one little problem, which isn't really a big deal. The
client machine has a 3com 3c905c network card. These cards have 3com's
MBA boot agent in ROM. The problem is, that I can't boot the kernel
off the server using the card's MBA program in rom.
In the server logs, the machine successfully gets its info from dhcp,
and asks tftp to give it the kernel image. Tftp sends the image fine,
but there are 2 more times after that where tftpd sends the image
successfully, after which the client reboots. I wish I could see the
screen on the client to give me a better idea of what's
happening. Maybe when I have a sightling here next time, I'll ask them
to tell me what's going on.

I did tag the kernel image with mkelf-linux, and ran that through the
imggen utility.

For now, I'm booting a etherboot rom from a floppy, and that works
fine.

If there are slackware users interested in getting something like this
going, please let me know, and I could tar up my modified zipslack, and make it available for
download on my server, or I could write up a doc describing how to set
things up, and how to modify a stock zipslack.

Thanks to all those who recommended ltsp.org. Even though I couldn't
use it because I'm running slackware, it and the various linux howtos
got me started on modifying zipslack, and running it over nfs.

Greg


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