[H-GEN] eeprom tools

[Michael Anthon]

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> http://www.scyld.com/diag   (debian users, these appear to be included
> in the package nictools-pci )
>
> which contains a collection of eeprom tools, I was looking at an article
> on unix startup sequences at
> http://www.itworld.com/nl/unix_sys_adm/07312002/
> which mentions the 'eeprom' tool on Solaris systems. I didn't find an
> equivalent tool for linux. (I must be blind this early in the morning.)
>
These are 2 quite different beasties.  The OpenBoot system on Sun
hardware[1] is quite a powerful thing and even includes a Forth interpreter
[2].  The eeprom program is a tool that lets you modify settings in the
EEPROM that is used to store hardware configuration and bootup settings such
as where to boot from, what MAC address to use etc.

The linux tools you mention are meant for fiddling with the EEPROM settings
on network cards (hence the reason they are included in nic-tools).  The
LTSP stuff you mention is basically a [E]PROM image you can burn into a chip
that you then insert into your NIC [3] that allows it to do network boots.
While this is similar to using OpenBoot to do a network boot it is nowhere
near as advanced (at least as far as I am aware it isn't)

Cheers Michael

[1] note, not the Solaris OS as the article suggests
[2] who the hell ever learned Forth anyway?  I tried once and couldn't get
my head around it, even bought a book called "Starting Forth".  That said, I
could probably understand it better now but don't have any great desire to
do so.
[3] that's what the empty DIP socket on NICs is for


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