:> No, I'm just giving you the reality. Until I can buy *generic*
:> motherboards and/or ethernet cards that actually netboot, what
:> standards a few of them might use is moot.
:
:You can. Go do it. Guess what I'm working on PXE with? Yes, if you
:make a bad buying choice on the network card, you're going to spend a
:few dollars on a bootprom. *shrug* Welcome to "bootable" vs.
:"non-bootable" network cards.
You've just made my point. PXE sounds wonderful, but it isn't going
to be generic until you don't have to think about it.
Networking technology changes fairly quickly. Requiring specialized
hardware may accomplish your short-term goals, but it also locks you
into a technology which may or may not be able to keep up with the
times.
Many seemingly great technologies have gone by the wayside precisely
because of this problem. Some are on the brink -- LS120 floppies, for
example, almost went extinct because of a lack of generic compatibility.
They still might. I think network booting in a generic environment
will happen, but it isn't here yet.
:> We have exactly the same issues with netbooting that we had with CDRom
:> booting.
:
:Actually, what we have is the same set of issues that we've had with
:booting from cards with their own firmware since about 1986. (Possibly
:earlier; that's just when I first got involved with it.)
:
:By your logic, until motherboards have options for controlling the boot
:order of eg. plug-in SCSI adapters there is no point in you buying
:plug-in SCSI adapters. So what have you been using for the last
:thirteen years?
Complete nonsense. Even with SCSI drives you could still control
the boot ordering between the floppy, CDRom, and generic 'hard drive'
(being whatever was installed as C:). People who run SCSI drives
tend not to run IDE drives so the IDE<->SCSI ordering isn't an issue.
Network booting is much closer to the CDRom-booting problem then it is
to SCSI booting, which is why I used CDRom-booting as an example.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
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