Netbooting with RPL

Hi,

your should sniff the ethernet line at bootup and see what protocol it speaks.

Try these. The original netware ROMS booted a floppy disk image via ethernet - the later ones uses IPX.

These might boot it ... maybe ..

Hello,

I got a solution for my problem, although it isn't easy; flashing the BIOS didn't work at all (no version executed the Option ROM, but instead disabled Novell's one - even if I only removed the full-screen logo).

Novell's rom tries to boot via RPL, so I had to put up a rpld. It doesn't work to boot any linux kernel (neither bzImage nor zImage), but I can serve an etherboot rom in zrom format. My /etc/rpld.conf looks like this:

HOST { ethernet = 00:ma:ca:dd:re:ss; (the real mac goes here, of course) FILE { path = "/root/pcnet32.zrom"; load = 0x1000; }; execute = 0x1006; };

Etherboot grabs an ip off the dhcp server and then loads pxelinux.0 using tftp. Then, a memdisk (as kernel) and a dos boot floppy (as initrd) is loaded and executed. So I can repair (or at least boot) the system, when it won't do it alone. Because etherboot is flexible, there are many possibilities, including a diskless boot. Maybe this helps people in similar situations.

Regards, Sebastian