[syslinux] Using memdisk to remotely flash BIOS

[Michael Blandford]

H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> Egan Ford wrote:
>
>> I am using memdisk to remotely flash the BIOS and other firmware.  It 
>> works well
>> for most flash programs.  After the flash I need to initialize the 
>> NIC to send a
>> signal to my management server that the flash is complete.
>>
>> I am curious as to how others have solved this problem.
>>
>
> You probably want to reboot the machine at that point; could the TFTP 
> load (PXELINUX) handle that?

I too am very curious about how to do something like this.

I would like to boot dos boot images to configure hardware ( bios, raid, 
etc ) before the OS gets loaded.  However, updating to the next stage of 
the process is the hard part. 

I can hack it from the tftp side, but it would be nicer to handle it in 
the client so you could add logic to only do the update if the bios 
flash, etc was successful and reboot.

Is there a reasonable tcpip stack available for DOS ( and some basic 
utilities like a dhcp client, reboot, wget ) that could be used to 
manage this?

Michael