Re: network booting

[ol.sc@web.de (Oliver Schmidt)]

Hi,

>Yes, I am creating a seperate protocol (tentatively called "trivial
>network disk protocol") that will do the following
>1) provide a catalogue of all "volumes" (i.e. dsk & d64 images) hosted
>on a server
>2) allow individual sectors on a hosted volume to be read/written

I see. So the client would need to tell on which offset into on of the
images it wants to read/write. This is however - as you surely noticed
yourself - the basic functionality of a network file system, isn't it?

Most probably you've done that already but I've been looking around a
bit and found that NFSv2 is relatively simple and typically runs over
UDP:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1094.txt

These three operations map directly to your needs:
NFSPROC_READ
NFSPROC_WRITE
NFSPROC_READDIR

Here's a Pcap sample capture to get a feeling for the complexity and
overhead involved:
http://wiki.wireshark.org/Sample%20Captures?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=nfsv2.pcap.gz

Nevertheless I imagine that you're more into a specific solution. Do
you plan to be protocol compatible with the Final Replay network drive
server?:
http://www.oxyron.de/html/netdrive01src.zip

>then I intend to create a DOS image that
>1) has a command to allow the catalogue of volumes to be d/led from
>the server and a dsk selected
>2) has RWTS patched to redirect  sector read/write requests to the
>server.

I see. If you design your protocol on the level of standard 16-sector
sectors of 256 bytes, than it should be easy to be compatible to
ProDOS 8 140k images. As far as I understand it's "only" a question of
doing the sector skewing on the "right" side (server vs. client).

>The full bootstrap then would be
>1) DHCP to get IP address
>2) TFTP to d/l and execute the patched DOS 3.3 image

This doesn't mean a DOS 3.3 formatted disk image, but an memory image
of DOS 3.3 - correct? I wasn't aware that this is possible as a single
BIN file, thinking of page 3 vectors and alike...

>3) Patched DOS 3.3. pops up a menu from which one of the dsks served
>from the netboot65 server can be selected
>4) the HELLO from the selected dsk is executed (or if there is  no
>HELLO, then a catalogue is displayed, and the user can RUN/BRUN as
>necessary).

I see. Even if 2) wouldn't be possible with ProDOS 8 it would still be
cool to patch/extend ProDOS 8 to access your server, maybe replacing
the /RAM device. This would allow to use the whole AUX bank for the
IP65 and client code...

>> - WinPcap works fine with the "Microsoft Loopback Adapter".
>> - Both VICE and AppleWin put the WinPcap into promiscuous mode which
>> doesn't work with many/most WiFi drivers.
>
>If I connect Vice/AppleWin to "Microsoft Loopback Adapter", does that
>mean I could only talk to the host machine that the emulator is
>running on?

Yes.

>My challenge is, I want to get a DHCP address dished out by my
>broadband router, and then talk TFTP and my custom protocol to a
>server running on the host machine.

I see. Then the MS Loopback Adapter won't help...

Best, Oliver