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Any Bootable Wireless NICs ?
ReidMaynard asks: "Recently I've been playing with the idea of a wireless netboot system...however, I would like not to use a floppy to boot from. I understand that if a NIC card has a EPROM socket, I can flash an EPROM and stick it in the NIC to do a netboot ... but I cannot seem to locate any wireless cards (or more exactly) any pcmcia-to-PCI adaptors which have a EPROM socket ... does anyone know of such an animal ... or a PCMCIA card which has a built-in programmable area (unlikely) ...?" This is one of those things that sounds really obvious once it's been spoken, but I'd never thought about this before. Sure would have been nice in certain office environments I've been in.
I bought a small wireless network from my boss (I worked in a very small hardware/software support company) about a year ago. When we were discussing the different components, one of the things that came up was the PCI-to-PCMCIA adapter. I remember him pointing out that the adapter was designed to work with any PCMCIA card and not just the wireless card. My thinking is that the people designing these things decided not to include an EPROM socket simply because it was meant to be interchangeable in that manner. I'm just speculating here, and I can't speak for any other brand (mine's an Aviator Webgear), but odds are that you will have to a) build one yourself or b) pay someone to custom build this for you.
Stored in the basement at work there are three or four ISA legacy NCR wavelan cards. Each of these have an empty EPROM socket. They run in the 900 Mhz band (915 Mhz I think), max data speed of 2Mbit. At one time we used one in a server to provide home access for an employee. I do not know if there are any access-points for these. The chips on the board either have NCR or AT&T(NCR) on them, this was probably before Lucent was around. Linux support is provided by the wavelan driver, you need the iwconfig program to set the particulars. Also the cards do not have built in antennaes, you need to connect one to the BNC connector on the card.
This is probably through the Open Firmware.
All macs have a cool bootloader known as Open Firmware. This takes the form of a tiny little forth interpreter, and this is also where netboot-ing takes place. So, I am guessing that there are Ethernet drivers built into to this. As for Wireless cards, they seem fairly similar to regular nics, so mabey it is already supported. As I recall, the OF has a whoooole bunch of drivers, like USB and audio, already built in.
To check it out, restart your mac, and hold down apple-option-o-f when it first turns on. You will get a nice little shell in a few seconds. As I recall, type printenv to see a list a variables. A bunch of these have to do with netboot. I would guess that if you just set the IP, etc, evertyhing will work out.
Good Luck
--Alex Fishman