Configuring Boot with Off-board ISA Intel Pro/100
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So I have a bit of a particular situation here.
I have a dated machine that I’ve previously used FOG to backup, however since then the network card has died. Since I need network connectivity on the machine otherwise, I have installed an ISA Intel EtherExpress Pro/100 which allows me access while using WinXP. However, I cannot figure out what I can do to continue using FOG via this off-board network card.
I cannot replace the motherboard, proprietary BIOS.
If there is another imaging solution that would allow me to backup over my network using this ISA card, feel free to recommend. I’m not opposed to using another product, I just already have fog configured for this machine and others. -
This must be a really old (ancient) network card. Does this card have a ROM slot in it?
Some of the pro/100s had a utility that you needed to use to enable pxe booting.
ref: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/network-and-i-o/ethernet-products/000005992.html
ref: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/network-and-i-o/ethernet-products/000005626.htmlIt appears you need the bootutil.exe utility to interact with the network card. I remember that the 3com cards had a similar configuration utility for their isa cards.
<edit> found another site with instructions for enabling the pxe boot agent on the intel cards: http://www.urtech.ca/2010/08/how-to-make-an-intel-network-card-pxe-boot/
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Yes, indeed it is!
The intel links provided look familiar, I may have attempted this already some time ago. I seem to remember lack of support for the ISA cards. However, I could be mistaken, I’ll give it a shot.<edit> First stop: Find a boot rom or a new card, I guess.
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@wanderbread Is the boot rom socket filled?
If you have no success with the onboard boot rom, you can always boot from a USB stick into the fog ipxe menu. In this case you will use an alternate pxe boot rom called ipxe which fog uses to supplement the pxe boot rom.
This is a somewhat older info, but should get you started. https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6347/usb-boot-bios-client-into-fog-menu If you need help I can help build this boot kernel for you.
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@george1421 No, there’s nothing in the socket, that coupled with the fact that I don’t think ISA-to-USB cards even exist is why I was thinking I needed to find a new wireless card, unless there is a way I could use that boot image on a CD or floppy disk. Plan on diving into all that today to see where I can get.
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@wanderbread (warning: relying on a very old memory here) If there is no chip socket for the Pro/100 it should have the pxe firmware built in, it just needs to be enabled with the utility I mentioned.
As for the usb boot. Depending on how old the motherboard is, it may support booting off usb, or you can go the bootable cd-rom route. Either way we can get the pxe boot media to work. Finding ISA network cards may be a bit challenging. (ok let me correct what I said above) ISA == Computers before the PC2000 standard came out. So they will not/support usb booting, even if there is a usb spot to plug in to.)
The Rom-o-matic site does support creating an iso (cdrom) boot image if needed.
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@george1421 Yeah, there’s no USB port on the board to speak of, I was insinuating I’d need to buy a (non-existent) card to go that route.
Also, this network card appears to have a socket with no chip.
However, I’m inclined to believe what you said about the firmware being built in if the socket isn’t present because the links you provided to the Intel boot utility specifies it’s compatible with Pro/100… but I don’t think I have one it’s compatible with, per the empty socket. I’ll have to try, unfortunately that will have to wait until the machine isn’t being used. -
@wanderbread Will you tell me the IP address of your fog server?
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@george1421 Unfortunately no, because it’s on a hidden sub-net, kept in the dark from the outside world.
Prior to having FOG set up ransom-ware got to the current machine in question, along with 2 other identical machines. Put our production team down for two days thanks to one of our electrical eng’s downloading some printer drivers from a shady website. Crawled nearly our entire network.
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@wanderbread OK fair enough we can still work with that. I should have time in a bit to recreate the iso you need to burn to a cdrom.
(But if the fog server is on a private IP address, it would do little good for me to know its at 192.168.1.50 since that isn’t a routable IP address. There is no way I can reach it from here. Now if your fog server is using a public address [internet based] then you have more issues than me knowing it.)
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@george1421 Oh sorry, (duhhh moment), 192.168.30.11 is the IP address I use internally.
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@wanderbread Lets start with the simple iso image format. If this doesn’t work then I’ll go through the advanced route to create the iso.
We’ll use the ipxe rom-o-matic site to create the iso image you will burn onto a cdrom (dvd is not needed since the ipxe kernel is so small).
You will download that and burn it to a cdrom. To aid in your comfort scan it for viruses if you need. Then when you have time cdrom boot your computer and it should connect you to the fog ipxe menu. If not we’ll go the advanced route which will give me a bit more control on the drivers used.
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@george1421 Thanks. This is greatly appreciated, I’ve got it on a disk. I’ll have to wait until our production hours are over to test, but I’ll get back to you.
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@george1421 I’m not seeing where the IP is applicable on rom-o-matic. I’m probably overlooking something, attempting to create a different boot image. I didn’t have any luck with the image you provided.
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@wanderbread Well that is a bit disappointing, but somewhat expected. Did it have an issue with detecting a dhcp IP address? Or was there a different error?
We’ll have to go through the advanced route and take some of the guesswork out of what is in the image. The IP address is the address of your fog server and we are chain loading to the fog server.
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@george1421 Well I wasn’t actually able to boot from the image… or at least it seems that way. I set my boot order accordingly; on startup it went through the normal stuff, then "Boot from CD: " was displayed, the cursor blinked for 20 to 30 seconds, and it proceeded to boot from the HDD.
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@wanderbread Interesting… You should have seen at least an iPXE splash screen.
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@george1421 Upon further inspection, I don’t think the disk-drive is capable of reading from the disk I used, or something. I attempted to browse the disk in Explorer and I get an error saying the disk may be corrupt.
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@wanderbread Well the disk may not be readable from windows since the disk format may be a linux variant.
