Re: network booting

[Eric Rucker <bhtooefr@gmail.com>]

On Jan 10, 9:08 am, Jonno Downes <jonno...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've just had a few "family free" days while my better half was
> visiting her mother, so I've been playing around with some code to do
> a 'network boot'.
>
> Here is a dsk image [http://www.jamtronix.com/dsks/utherboot.dsk]
> that does the following
> - boots up dos 3.3
> - obtains an IP address via DHCP
> - looks for a TFTP server on the local LAN
> - downloads a file called BOOTA2.BIN via tftp
> - executes that file.
>
> It's an alpha release (i.e. for the patient and adventurous only) with
> the following limitations:
> - only tested in AppleWin to date (I don't have acces to my real A2's
> just at the moment)
> - requires an uthernet card in slot 3
> - requires a language card (or a iie)
> - requires a DHCP server somewhere on your LAN
> - requires a TFTP server somewhere on your LAN, that serves a file
> canned BOOTA2.BIN
> - BOOTA2.BIN must have a standard DOS 3.3 Binary fil 4 byte header (2
> byte load address, 2 byte file length)
>
> Eventually I want to get this to something that hides in a rom
> somewhere, and does a proper 'diskless boot'. Some other obvious
> enhancements are:
> - a menu driven directory so you can select from all the files on the
> server
> - a patched RWTS so you can boot whole images not just individual
> files
>
> If anyone wants to poke around with the code, it's athttps://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=250168
>
> This code is based on IP65 (http://www.paradroid.net/ip65)
>
> Cheers
>
> Jonno
>
> ps - if you want to run a tftp server (e.g.http://tftpd32.jounin.net/
> ) on the same machine you are running Applewin on, it seems that you
> need to have two nics, and have uthernet bound to one, and the tftp
> server listen to the other. Otherwise the packets that the uthernet
> card sends out are never seen by anything else running on the same
> machine (VICE has the same behaviour, so it must be a feature of the
> way they both use winpcap). Luckily my laptop has a wifi and a wired
> connections.

You know, if you're using DHCP and TFTP... I think you're already most
of the way to PXE.

How cool would it be if you could bring up an Apple II on a PXE
server, just by adding a system architecture for it for the PXE server
and a boot image of some sort? And, just put a PXE boot ROM card in
slot 7 or something.