network booting



I've just had a few "family free" days while my better half was
visiting her mother, so I've been playing around with some code to do
a 'network boot'.

Here is a dsk image [ http://www.jamtronix.com/dsks/utherboot.dsk ]
that does the following
- boots up dos 3.3
- obtains an IP address via DHCP
- looks for a TFTP server on the local LAN
- downloads a file called BOOTA2.BIN via tftp
- executes that file.

It's an alpha release (i.e. for the patient and adventurous only) with
the following limitations:
- only tested in AppleWin to date (I don't have acces to my real A2's
just at the moment)
- requires an uthernet card in slot 3
- requires a language card (or a iie)
- requires a DHCP server somewhere on your LAN
- requires a TFTP server somewhere on your LAN, that serves a file
canned BOOTA2.BIN
- BOOTA2.BIN must have a standard DOS 3.3 Binary fil 4 byte header (2
byte load address, 2 byte file length)

Eventually I want to get this to something that hides in a rom
somewhere, and does a proper 'diskless boot'. Some other obvious
enhancements are:
- a menu driven directory so you can select from all the files on the
server
- a patched RWTS so you can boot whole images not just individual
files

If anyone wants to poke around with the code, it's at
https://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=250168

This code is based on IP65 ( http://www.paradroid.net/ip65 )

Cheers

Jonno

ps - if you want to run a tftp server (e.g. http://tftpd32.jounin.net/
) on the same machine you are running Applewin on, it seems that you
need to have two nics, and have uthernet bound to one, and the tftp
server listen to the other. Otherwise the packets that the uthernet
card sends out are never seen by anything else running on the same
machine (VICE has the same behaviour, so it must be a feature of the
way they both use winpcap). Luckily my laptop has a wifi and a wired
connections.
.



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