On 9/21/07, John Summerfield <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I have used etherboot, but I wouldn't if I had a proper boot rom, and it
> seems every system on the market these days does.

I would opt for something else also if I had the time to get it going
or, preferably, could persuade someone else to take the time. Neither
of the current binary versions of etherboot seemed to work when used
to initiate PXE or download a boot file directly. But we had some
etherboot floppies from a few years ago that did work and so we are
using those. Not the best of situations.

> PXE is described in
> the RHEL documentation available from www.redhat.com.

It is described but the package that contains it is missing from
RHEL5.0 distribution because of unspecified issues according to a post
I saw on the web. The Fedora equivalent was claimed to work.

PXE works on our nodes but the BIOS is not configured to boot from it
which would mean getting at and changing it on the nodes. The BIOS
does not seem to talk to a serial console which would mean
experimenting to determine if something else could get at the BIOS
settings. Perhaps but it all takes time and we are engineers not
sysadmins. Experience has taught us that our sysadmin support can/will
not do this sort of thing and so we do it ourselves. In a hurry which,
of course, takes ages.

> I would fully expect KS to work from a SUSE server of any age, though
> one with DHCP3 is to be preferred. One can do magical things with DHCP3.

It is now working with the old SUSE server but I do not know what
version of DHCP is being used. It seems to do the job.