Re: [ProgSoc] Challenge to ProgSoc members

[Simon Blainey <sblainey@nospam.socs.uts.edu.au>]

On Fri, 29 May 1998, Telford Tendys wrote:

->Yeah, about the boot disc. Debian's boot floppy might be a good place
->to start with, it doesn't use LILO but something else that's kind of similar
->and you can drop your own kernel into it and also put your own message
->screens at the start. There's a toolkit for setting it up and all.
->
->X is quite big though, it's gonna be a bit tight doing it all from ramdisc
->because the X server is a bit of a ram hog to begin with. It also at least
->needs support for some local shells and telnet running locally too.

I was actually thinking about using BOOTP, or something similar. If we
store the image on ftoomsh, or geryon or whatever and it can be downloaded
to the local machine from there.

->
->Then there's the problem of IP numbers, how do the current machines
->figure out their IP numbers and how are we going to code it onto a floppy?
->

yes, a very very very good point, ummm, is there a way we can input that
kind of data at the "Boot:" prompt? What about using RARP? As in the
machine knows it's hardware address and just needs to figure out it's ip
address. Actually RARP is the best soloution....much neater :)

->How about machine names? I guess once it has an IP number, it does
->a reverse DNS lookup to figure out it's own name -- a bit messy but
->workable.

yeah that's easy :)

I guess what we have to do is emulate a diskless workstation (like the
ones in the far end of the solarium), but using a PC, and hell if we neecd
more storage than a single floppy, can we make it use two? I mean I am
sure that people wouldn't object to using two floppies to turn a pc into a
workstation, would they?

Regards,                                           sblainey@nospam.socs.uts.edu.au
Simon..                                          scatter@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au

http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~scatter

 "Baldrick, believe me: eternity in the company of Beezlebub and all his
  hellish instruments of death will be a picnic compared to five minutes
  with me -- and this pencil -- if we can't replace this Dictionary."
  -- Edmund Blackadder III (Ink and Incapability)	

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