On Thu, Aug 09, 2007 at 10:42:41AM +0200, Thomas Lange wrote: > >>>>> On Thu, 9 Aug 2007 09:37:02 +0200, Henning Fehrmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >>>>> said: > > > we are interested in flashing a BIOS image and in manipulating the > NVRAM of the motherboard > > automatically. > Wow. Do you really need this? > > > Unfortunately, using certain vendors, the access to the NVRAM is not > straightforward. > > These vendors are offering DOS tools only, to write in the NVRAM, > hence, we have to boot > > a DOS image and here starts the trouble. > You can boot a DOS or floppy image using PXE. This is how a > pxelinux.cfg looks like for booting a floppy image: > > default dos > label dos > kernel memdisk > append keeppxe initrd=floppy.img > > But AFAIR I had no success, because the dos flashing utilities seems > to wanna have a real floppy, not a fake of a floppy.
It worked here, but I think that's something Henning has got running too. The problem is to tell the server to swap its PXE config file for this particular machine *after* the flash has been completed but *before* rebooting (automatically or by power cycle/IPMI reset). It'd be necessary to send some kind of "signal" to the server (a dummy tftp request is what I've done in the past, at least from a tomsrtbt image I used to perform some partitioning magic). Therefore, it would be nice to have a network stack under freedos (which the BIOS flash disks nowadays are based on). > > Optimally, using the DOS environment flashes the BIOS, sets the > > NVRAM and sends a message to the FAI server to prepare the next boot of > the clients for the > > installation. > You could send a message to the faimond which can change the pxelinux > configuration. That's the problem: to get a reasonable message *somewhere* you'd need a TCP/IP stack. Or am I missing something? Cheers, Steffen
