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Any Bootable Wireless NICs ?

Posted by timothy on from the intriguing-query dept.

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.

2 of 18 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe a better solution by jcausey · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I did a little research on this about 6 months ago, and I didn't find one damn thing. Last poster is right about the mem address point; however, that is a lot easier said than done.

    A slightly better idea would be to get one of those IDE flash drives w/1 MB of space or so (even less). Put the netboot data on them like you would a floppy. This way, it's less expensive, easier to use, and much cheaper to upgrade to a better 802.11 standard when it comes.

  2. Other way... by obi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Some other poster mentioned a flash connected to your ide. But if you're adventurous, you can use something like the linuxbios project (http://linuxbios.org) - what they are doing is overwriting your bios using a stripped down version of linux. Then it can boot another linux image from disk, or from the network.

    Additional advantage: you get in linux in 3 seconds in some cases :)

    Of course it all depends if your chipset supports it, and if you're willing to risk it. (of course if you have a flasher, so that you can restore a working bios image it's less of a risk)