Syslinux - Jan 2006 - Bootable Floppy w/ Networking & Shell?

I realize this is probably the wrong list but since some of the 
principals this list deals with are similar in nature I figured it 
could't hurt.

What I am looking to do:
Provide a solution to either boot from a floppy disk, establish a 
network connection, give user the ability to run utilities such as fdisk 
and dd. as well as provide the same solution as a PXE bootable image.

My question:
Does anyone on this list have a solution in place such as this, or 
perhaps a method (the simpiler the better) to create a bootable floppy 
with these three requirements?  I have been looking around and so far I 
have found solutions which require me to build a stipped down kernel 
with specific network card support, creating the filesystem and 
installing the kernel and any utils I need.  Is there any solution 
anyone knows of which is less cubersome?

TIA

-- 
Jason Gerfen

"The charge that he had insulted Turkey's armed forces was dropped, but
he still faces  the charge that he insulted "Turkishness", lawyers
said."
 ~ BBC News Article

On 1/18/06, Jason Gerfen <jason.gerfen at scl.utah.edu>
wrote:
> I realize this is probably the wrong list but since some of the
> principals this list deals with are similar in nature I figured it
> could't hurt.
>
> What I am looking to do:
> Provide a solution to either boot from a floppy disk, establish a
> network connection, give user the ability to run utilities such as fdisk
> and dd. as well as provide the same solution as a PXE bootable image.
>
> My question:
> Does anyone on this list have a solution in place such as this, or
> perhaps a method (the simpiler the better) to create a bootable floppy
> with these three requirements?  I have been looking around and so far I
> have found solutions which require me to build a stipped down kernel
> with specific network card support, creating the filesystem and
> installing the kernel and any utils I need.  Is there any solution
> anyone knows of which is less cubersome?
>
> TIA
>
> --
> Jason Gerfen
>
> "The charge that he had insulted Turkey's armed forces was
dropped, but he still faces  the charge that he insulted
"Turkishness", lawyers said."
>  ~ BBC News Article
>
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>
Unless I misunderstand, it sounds to me as if what you're looking for
is a live distro -- what usually is called a "rescue disc."  I know of
several, but, probably the one I use the most currently would be
Finnix.  Mind you, Finnix runs off of a CD-ROM and it something like
90MB or so large (maybe slightly more.)  So not what you're looking
for I guess.  If you want a floppy with as much as possible, I think
TOMSRTBT is about the closest you're going to get to something
designed to fit on a floppy, albiet with the help of a utility to
format it to 1.72MB or so (can't recall the exact number, but,
supposedly it works on very nearly all 1.44 floppy disks and drives.) 
I don't know if you can use a tool like memdisk via PXE?  Sorry, I
don't do networked boots.  In fact, I've never even tried one.

El Mi?rcoles, 18 de Enero de 2006 12:53, Jason Gerfen
escribi?:
> I realize this is probably the wrong list but since some of the
> principals this list deals with are similar in nature I figured it
> could't hurt.
>
> What I am looking to do:
> Provide a solution to either boot from a floppy disk, establish a
> network connection, give user the ability to run utilities such as fdisk
> and dd. as well as provide the same solution as a PXE bootable image.
On this list someone was published a PXE multiboot floppy.
You can use this floppy to load PXE stack for most compliant network cards.
Then, you can boot a small initrd and a big kernel with the most popular 
network drives on there, switching with chroot on a NFS network folder, you 
can have a big linux console running with less memory, (16MB or more).

You can use busybox if you wish, and if you like tellme the popular network 
cards you own and I can build a demo floppy, that can establish a network 
connection, and has not build the drivers, do some probes to load only the 
ones, and uses a udhcpcd to set up the network card.

Then you can mount a NFS volume and do a chroot.

And of course you can use memdisk to emulate floppy boot trow the network, 
with PXE.

> My question:
> Does anyone on this list have a solution in place such as this, or
> perhaps a method (the simpiler the better) to create a bootable floppy
> with these three requirements?  I have been looking around and so far I
> have found solutions which require me to build a stipped down kernel
> with specific network card support, creating the filesystem and
> installing the kernel and any utils I need.  Is there any solution
> anyone knows of which is less cubersome?
>
> TIA
-- 
Gustavo Guillermo P?rez
Compunauta uLinux
www.compunauta.com

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 11:38:02AM -0600, Gustavo Guillermo P?rez wrote:
   <snip/>
> On this list someone was published a PXE multiboot floppy.
> You can use this floppy to load PXE stack for most compliant network cards.
Read more about it at
 ftp://ftp.scyld.com/private/jlehan/pxe-on-a-disk.html


HtH
GSt