> As part of the neverending drive to make LTSP available to the masses ;-) > we're looking for some magic to detect the NIC and video card in old PCs. > Now it's vital to examine the NIC and get the right image from rom-o-matic, > and put this on a floppy in order to get it on the network. This is scary for > an uninitiated teacher in a school that likes the idea of LTSP, but have little > technical experience. > > We have dabbled with some programs that claim to find ISA cards, but > have not had much success. So I wondered if anyone on this list has tried > to put together a floppy that will find the NIC and video card, report it to > screen or perhaps initialize the NIC and send it to the LTSP server to have > it automagically update the files involved there. Or have any ideas how this > should be done. Or even tell us that we are out of our minds to even > suggest it.
Any installation disk from a distribution e.g. Red Hat does this. The method is simple - just load every available driver in turns until one reports that it has found a card of the type it supports. There is an automatic way to do this: from the modprobe(8) man page... Modprobe has two ways of loading modules. One way (the probe mode) will try to load a module out of a list (defined by pattern ). Modprobe stops loading as soon as one module loads successfully. This could be used to autoload one Ethernet driver out of a list. So you could just try an install and see what driver the kit uses. (NB this is not the same driver used by Etherboot or rom-o-matic but it should identify the NIC). The NIC is normally announced on one of the virtual consoles when the driver is loaded during a network install, or when the system reboots after a disk/CD install. This method works on for any NIC that some driver knows about. You don't know about any cards for which there are no drivers, but are you bothered since you won't be able to use them anyway? PCI cards are easier as one can probe the bus without a driver loaded. % /sbin/lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX Host bridge (rev 03) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX AGP bridge (rev 03) 00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02) 00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01) 00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 USB (rev 01) 00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02) 00:0e.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905B 100BaseTX [Cyclone] (rev 30) 00:13.0 VGA compatible controller: 3Dfx Interactive, Inc.: Unknown device 0005 (rev 01) 00:14.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq: Unknown device 5880 (rev 02) For completeness - there are some more "head-on" methods. First, take the covers off and look at the printing on the NIC itself - is there a manufacturers logo or an identifier on the chips? This may tell you enough to search on the manufacturers web page or do a Google search. Power cycle and see what the BIOS startup messages say. If you know the MAC address (maybe from the BIOS, printed on the NIC or from network traffic) look up the first 3 "OUI" bytes at <http://standards.ieee.org/ regauth/oui/> to find the vendor. If this narrows it down, then you can exhaustively try every possible rom-o-matic image. This will tell you quick enough if there's nothing there. Bribe some of your pupils to make some floppies and sit there trying them. Finally, be prepared for the fact that though Linux itself supports just about every NIC in existance, Etherboot still doesn't have quite so many. NICs are fairly cheap, even by the standards of a school budget, and second hand ones might even be free if you can find a local company throwing out old systems. _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.openprojects.net
