[geeks] Can I netboot...

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Michael Parson wrote:

> It's not really that your project isn't cool enough for us here, at
> least, I don't really think that's all it.  The core of your problem
> is that the networking stack in Windows 95 just isn't up to the task
> you're asking of it.  Win9x just wasn't a server platform, even XP
> Home would do a better job than 95.

Given that IP is a peer-to-peer networking protocol, "server OS" versus
"client OS" doesn't enter into it.  The big problem is that I don't
think there exist rarp and rpc.bootparam servers for Windows 95.

I don't know if OpenBoot 2.x will let you set the interface and server
IP addresses by hand, but I'm pretty sure I've booted OpenBoot 3.x
systems that way without a RARP daemon.

> If you want to do sparc programming and netboot it, you're simply
> going to need a different boot server than an old Microsoft offering.

Or convince the SPARC to -just- do the tftp-load from a particular
system.  Given that OpenBoot has the functionality to load tftp bode
from an arbitrary server, it's probably possible to hand-feed the
interface configuration information, as well.  The trouble is that
nothing below "boot net" is documented very well (and may be
system-specific).

I will probably be digging into this very stuff when I get my next batch
of free time, as I'd like to toy with writing small standalone programs
for sun4m and pmax systems.

> Hardware of your vintage isn't going to run newer MS OSes very well,
> and if you insist on sticking with them, you might want to give NT 4.0
> (sp6a?) a shot.

NT 4.0 is a very fine Windows operating system.  3.5.1 is good, too and
will be very speedy on a 90MHz system.  Software support for 3.5.1 (w/
SP3 or later) should be approximately equivalent with software support
for Windows 95.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke   )  "someone set us up the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL."
Elgin, TX          (                                           --jimmy