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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.

3 of 18 comments (clear)

  1. Mac and Airport? by shumacher · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I know the "New World" (i.e. anything from the iMac on) Macs will netboot. But I've not tried netbooting them via Airport. For that matter, I can't think of a reason that would prevent netbooting something besides MacOS.
    Anyone try this?

    1. Re:Mac and Airport? by ivan256 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Setup you BOOTP/DHCP and TFTP servers apropriatly and then try this command at the Open Firmware prompt:

      'boot enet:<NIC #>,<bootfile name>'

      enet:0 should give you the onboard cabled ethernet, and enet:1 should let you boot off the wireless. Whatever you put as the bootfile name is the file it will download off the TFTP server and execute.

  2. Use another card with an EPROM by specht · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you have an empty slot in the machine you could add e.g. a standard NIC card with an EPROM socket. The EPROM socket on these cards has nothing to do with the cards core functionality, it's just a place where you can put a BIOS extension EPROM.

    It's been a long time since I played with booting a machine over the net and I don't remember the name of the package that allows to create an EPROM image or a floppy image from the same data. The floppy image allows you to test the package before you burn it into an EPROM. Use this and see if you can the machine to boot via the wireless card. If it works, then burn the EPROM and put it into the standard NIC card (which you don't even have to configure).

    Karl Heinz