[Nottingham] Linux Media PC

[Michael Quaintance]

Matt wrote:

>1) Does anyone know of a good cheap NIC that will boot from the
>network.  Everything I've found online offers "slot for boot ROM" as
>opposed to already having one installed.
>  
>
Welcome to the world of PXE booting. It's fun but getting hold of 
suitable nic's can be hard. Basically it was a protocol designed for 
enterprise networks and as such is only really found by default on 
enterprise-level nics. I say was because it has now fallen out of 
fashion and many of the newer gigabit nic's don't support it at all.

Anyway, I wasn't prepared to pay £60 plus per nic to equip my home 
network with this feature, so I looked elsewhere. eBay can be your 
friend. It took a little while and I ended up with second-hand cards of 
dubious history but I haven't had any problems yet.

To understand some of the issues surrounding pxe, have a look at 
http://syslinux.zytor.com/ the homepage of the syslinux project. This 
incorporates pxelinux (amongst others) which is basically your pxe 
bootloader.

Note: a lot of 3Com cards with a PXE boot rom have 'issues' so I would 
recommend looking for intel cards in preference. And avoid intel cards 
with boot rom's at version 0.99 or lower. I have a touchscreen with an 
embedded intel card at 0.99h for which no firmware upgrade is available 
and it has given me some interesting issues getting the config sorted.

Best of luck.

-Penfold.