The goal is not to net-boot NT/2000, the goal is to be able to boot those OSs off of fibre channel. But with a fibre channel disk as directed by a central management system.
As it stands, it's not difficult to boot an x86 box (any OS) off of fibre channel, you just have to hand administrate the box first by staring at pixels and pounding the keyboard (you have 5 seconds to hit Alt-Q or Alt-E or Alt-S... oops... try again.) This could be done by using a PC Weasel (http://www.realweasel.com/) and expect scripts, but I'd rather do it correctly. I think that it has to be done with a scriptable secondary boot loader that has access to the appropriate drivers. The primary boot loader has to be statically configured so as to avoid the pixel/keyboard configuration problem. That leaves us with net boot of a secondary loader. The secondary loader needs to be Linux based in order to have access to current fibre channel drivers. Then, either the OS's native loader can be read from the final root disk, or if the Linux-based loader knows how to do it, it can load the final OS. Ben -----Original Message----- From: Ronald G Minnich [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Saturday, February 02, 2002 8:23 AM To: Stefanos Papanicolopulos Cc: Ben Stoltz; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Advice appreciated... On Sat, 2 Feb 2002, Stefanos Papanicolopulos wrote: > I don't get it. Even supposing LinuxBIOS (or whoever) provided the > necessary interface to run Windows, how would you net boot them? esp. given all the licensing considerations. how do you netboot something that is hard-wired to the machine you're on? ron
