Floppy and tftp - was Woody Freeze
From: jpk@cape.com (Jacob Kuntz)
> Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2001 11:53:47 -0400
> Subject: Re: Woody Freeze Plans - Progress Report
> from the secret journal of Jan Nieuwenhuizen (janneke@gnu.org):
> > Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:
> > > i build *ALL* of my debian servers using floppies and a network card.
> >
> > You have floppy drives in your servers? You should maybe try tftp.
>
> Not likely if Craig uses off-the-shelf PC hardware. They don't have a boot
> monitor, remember. Floppies aren't going away in this respect untill a lot
> more network cards are available with a flash chip.
Nonono. You put the network boot code on the floppy. www.etherboot.org
The PC thinks it is doing a floppy boot, so almost any system can do that,
then the loaded code actually does a network boot from there on.
It would be very convenient to have a debian package that depends on
tftp server and dhcp server, then configures them for you. All unexpected
computers asking to boot are given the choice of becoming terminals
(aka www.ltsp.org) or of immediately installing debian to the hard disk.
It wasn't hard to set that up manually, but could easily be trivialized.
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