hlison@bbn.com (Herb Lison) (07/13/88)
The Western Digital WD8003EB Ethernet card apparently has a boot PROM on board for use in diskless PCs. Does anyone know if it is possible to such a beast in a SUN UNIX environment to run a TCP/IP application. It seems to me there might be a problem in assigning IP addresses. But if this is possible, it might be very useful. Herb Lison
jas@proteon.COM ("John A. Shriver") (07/14/88)
It should be doable in theory. There is certainly enough room in a typical PC PROM socket to write a TFTP bootstrap. The part that is tricky is getting DOS's bootstrap process to work. What NetWare boot PROMs do is load a RAM disk into the PC, and boot standard DOS from it, which in turn starts the NetWare shell. I presume one could do the same with PC-NFS inside the RAM disk. Once that's running, you've got to do some sort of hyperspace jump to flush the RAM disk and have DOS running of the NFS disk. It can be done, it would be intense.