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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. My Opinion on Why This Probably Doesn't Exist by Starquake · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  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)