On 9 Aug 2007, at 10:03 am, Steffen Grunewald wrote:
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).
RLX got around this with their blade deployment system in a very
hacky way; the DOS image they used included the Windows for
Workgroups TCP/IP stack, and therefore SMB support, and they used
this to update a status file for the node being deployed back on the
Control Tower DHCP server. Nasty, but it worked.
Tim
--
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a
company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered
office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
