Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 23:49:52 -0700 (PDT) From: "Jamil J. Weatherbee" <jamil@counterintelligence.ml.org> To: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Diskless Workstation -- Problems needing to be addressed Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970923234535.643B-100000@counterintelligence.ml.org> In-Reply-To: <199709240411.GAA20679@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
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I think in my situation since I am slowly transitioning from 10 base T to 100 baseT I can just put Two cards in each (I don't know what function this really serves since the bootp server is also sits betweens the networks and acts as a router?) but I'd much rather look at the specs and work it out (that will be the long term solution --- perhaps also educational). On Wed, 24 Sep 1997, Luigi Rizzo wrote: > > Last time I called Linksys they were reluctantly willing to give me some > > unusual info about the NE2000 cards we have, and possibly I could buy a > > boot rom off them and take a look at it :>) > > my experience on this: I looked at a boot rom for some other PCI > ne200 clone. They only had code for novell, and internally the rom > looked much different from what "PCI system architecture" says... > My experience is that some BIOSes work fine with a normal ISA boot > rom such as the one produced by netboot, and others (presumably > old ones) seem not to like boot roms on PCI cards (the same card+rom > on another system works fine) even if build the way PCI system > architecture says. So my advice is to try the standard rom first... > > As a quick and dirty alternative, since I have some broken ISA > network cards, at times I put there the card with the only purpose > of acting as a boot rom socket. > > One more advanced option could be to update the flash bios to > include the boot room, but this is a bit risky... > > As for 100 Mbit/s cards, remember they are quite different from ne2000, > and that you will probably have to import a lot of code the controller > (DEC 21x4x ?) they use. Unfortunately you cannot just link in say > if_de.c , probably a lot of hand editing would be necessary (and a copy > of the controller's data sheets). Luckily PCI cards tend to have only > one chip so if you have those docs (often available from the > manufacturer, e.g. www.dec.com or www.intel.com) you are in good > shape... > > Cheers > Luigi > -----------------------------+-------------------------------------- > Luigi Rizzo | Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione > email: luigi@iet.unipi.it | Universita' di Pisa > tel: +39-50-568533 | via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy) > fax: +39-50-568522 | http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ > _____________________________|______________________________________ >
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