network card + eeprom

[Joel Pearson]

If you make a bios rom image at www.rom-o-matic.net it adds network and
local boot by default.  I've tried it on a computer at home and it works
very nicely.  It only takes 30 seconds to flash your bios as opposed to
burning eprom chips which I'm told can take up to 20 minutes (correct me
if I'm wrong). Plus it's a lot cheaper too.

Joel 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Joel Pearson
Email: pearj at writeme.com
ICQ:1580379
MSN: joelpearson at hotmail.com


-----Original Message-----
From: linux-admin at lists.samba.org [mailto:linux-admin at lists.samba.org]
On Behalf Of Robert Edwards
Sent: Wednesday, 23 October 2002 12:06 PM
To: Eyal Lebedinsky; linux at lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: network card + eeprom

On Mon, 21 Oct 2002 23:12, Eyal Lebedinsky wrote:
> Pietro Abate wrote:
> > Where can I find an eeprom programmer, a bunch of eeproms and
> > networks card in canberra at a good price ?
>
> My usual suggestion is to add the NIC prom to your motherboard
> BIOS prom. This way you do not need any prom chips or any
> programmer. This assumes your mobo is modern enough.
>
> See this for Award bios
> 	http://www.stormpages.com/crazyape/cbrom.html
> Or see this
> 	http://users.cybercity.dk/~dsl6178/bios/Bioslogo.html
> for a way to replace your mobo logo with something more personal...

I would advise against putting the boot rom code into the motherboard's
BIOS 
ROM, unless the code is clever enough to revert to normal boot order in
the 
absence of the network card. If you have it set up to boot from the
network 
and the network/server isn't working, it can be hard to bring the
machine up 
from a CD, hard disk or floppy. With the boot rom on the network card,
simply 
remove the card and all is well.

As for cards with boot rom sockets - we bought a pile of Trendnet cards 
almost 3 years ago for Bunyip (all in use now). We also use Intel EEPRO
100 
cards in all our other systems, which have built-in flash and a (DOS)
utility 
that allows easy programming. But the Intel cards are a lot more
expensive 
(work well, though).

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.