Re: [ProgSoc] Challenge to ProgSoc members

[Telford Tendys <telford@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au>]

> 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 :)

If we have any interest in keeping ITD on side then we don't want Progsoc
members going round using whatever is the first IP number to come into their
heads and generating network chaos.

> 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?

The Sun machines probably use nfs to source their files from and
tftp to get their initial kernel image. My vote is to just see how
many floppies it ends up on and leave it there.

However, there still remains the problem of system MEMORY.
Assuming you don't actually want a floppy as your working disc then
you need to load it all into ramdisc. This eats memory and if the
PCs are around 16M or less then being a bit careless will result
in an unusable machine. This means severely trimming down fonts and
display manager icons and any other crap that fills up space.

	- Tel
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