Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ncar!gatech!udel!princeton!siemens!drexel!jeff
From: jeff@drexel.UUCP (Jeff White)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: What's the best NETWORK?
Summary: I doubt ethernet proms support diskless booting
Message-ID: <591@drexel.UUCP>
Date: 15 May 88 03:43:02 GMT
References: <1814@uhccux.UUCP> <1815@uhccux.UUCP> <781@sleazy.UUCP> <2722@umd5.umd.edu>
Organization: Drexel University, Phila., Pa.
Lines: 40

> Do you or anyone have experience with boot proms on Apple Ethertalk cards?
> This is commonly done on PCs (eg, 3Com to boot from their XNS 3Share server,
> as well as Suns (seems to be no standard boot protocol in the IP world)).
> Probably the 3Com people who designed the Ethertalk card for Apple have
> done it, but the support for it in the MacOS seems to be a hot issue (read,
> sensitive until the recall issue is behind them).  Anyone care to speak up?
> -
> Dan Magorian
> Comp Sci Ctr
> Univ of Maryland
> 301 454-6032
> magorian@umd5.umd.edu
> magorian@umdd.bitnet
> Applelink A0190

   I doubt that the proms on Apple's (or anyone else's) ethernet board support
diskless booting.  I remember from discussions a couple of months ago on the
net that people were complaining that it wouldn't be possible to run the Mac II
as a diskless node under A/UX (a valid arguement, since A/UX does support NFS).
Apparently, a lot of the university users (then beta test sites) were 
complaining to Apple about this, especially considering that Apple was
requiring an 80 Mbyte drive per A/UX machine.  I seem to remember Apple's
position being that diskless stations wasn't an important, hence urgent 
feature for their machines to have.  The redundant, auto recovery filesystem
under A/UX would seem to make multiple diskless nodes difficult to implement
(Apple is also probably pretty happy to be selling 80 Meg drives to each A/UX
user).  
  As far as diskless booting under the Finder (Mac OS) goes, I think that
has even less chance of ever happening.  The diskless boot protocol under
NFS (ND) is standardized, so in theory it should be relatively trivial to
implement.  But if a diskless Mac wanted to remotely boot under the Finder,
what type of server would it look for (3Com, Tops, MacServer, AppleShare, etc.)?
I think the best you could hope for would be to create a floppy disk that when
booted, would automatically mount the network disks (ie. Tops), make that
virtual disk the startup disk, and then eject the floppy and remove it from
the desktop.  This would at least have the same final result as a diskless
boot, if not as clean.

						Jeff White
						Drexel University - ECE Dept.
						rutges!bpa!drexel!jeff