[lug] Backup

[Nate Duehr]

On Tuesday 27 December 2005 11:41 pm, Siegfried Heintze wrote:
> But don't you need a special ROM chip on your network card? I wonder
> if I have one on my new network card. Would this solution work if you
> had to boot both windows or linux over the network? I don't think so:
> the NAS server is either doing SMB/CIFS or NFS but not both --
> correct?

ROM = No -- modern business-class computers network cards and/or BIOS 
has the correct "stuff" to Network Boot.  The days of the add-on ROM 
chip on the network cards are long over, unless you're using older 
hardware that can't Net Boot and an old NIC.  If you're stuck in that 
position, get a good NIC that supports Net Boot like one of the Intel 
EtherExpress series, assuming your BIOS can handle Net Boot requests 
from a card correctly on that older machine.

Boot on most Net Boot protocols is handled by TFTP to initially get 
things going.  Once the system downloads the initial boot code via TFTP 
and gets a generic bootstrap done, then the next layer of software can 
use whatever network filesystem the admin desires, I suppose.  

Most Linux Net Boot setups use NFS.  Never Net Booted anything but Unix 
boxen, so I couldn't tell you if SMB/CIFS is useful, necessary, or 
smart... just never needed it/wouldn't know what would use it.

-- 
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com