[syslinux] token ring for pxelinux

Josef Siemes jsiemes at web.de
Thu Feb 27 03:43:03 PST 2003


Hi,

John Poltorak <jp at manninghammills.org> schrieb am 26.02.03 00:19:27:
> 
> On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 02:46:25PM -0800, richard turner wrote:
> > is token ring supported by pxelinux or only ethernet?
> 
> I'm interested in pxelinux over token ring too.
> 
> Which card I you looking at?

I have it  working with IBM Token Ring cards. All cards above 'IBM Token Ring
PCI Adapter 2' support PXE and RPL, the old 'IBM Token Ring PCI card' 
only supports RPL. Use the 'PXE 1 Rom' for booting clients, since the
'PXE 2' rom doesn't seem to work for me. Especially the 'low profile
token ring adapteer' comes with the PXE 2 rom preinstalled.

> I was also interested if it was possible to upload some microcode to 
> support a newer version of pxe...

IBM has updated PXE roms available, and you'll need a rom version of
at least 3.16 (AFAIR), since the old roms don't do anything good. You can
verify the rom version while booting the client, it shows at the 'AL-'
and 'BL-' fields. These should show something with '16', every older number
should be updated. And no, these are not the numbers the rom disk has ...

BTW, this is working quite good on about 1000 clients for two years now, 
with token ring on the client, ATM with lan-emulating token ring on the 
server (IBM RS/6000 with AIX 4.3.3).

And yes, token-ring is still used. I know of several banking and insurance customers
still using it. Some plan to migrate to ethernet, though.

If anyone needs more info on this, there's some documentation for the PXE rom
(and the RPL variant too ...) on the IBM web site. Also ask here, and I'll try to answer.

Regards,

Josef

______________________________________________________________________________
Mit der Gruppen-SMS von WEB.DE FreeMail erreichen Sie mit einem Klick 
alle Freunde gleichzeitig! http://freemail.web.de/features/?mc=021180




More information about the Syslinux mailing list