Booting Diskless workstation over wireless...???

[wcgrnway]

I'm currently tasked with developing a solution that allows a diskless cardbus capable portable laptop or tablet PC to boot off a WIRELESS network. Most of the OS image serving software I have found in my research requires PXE support either on the adapter or through the BIOS.

For the short-term I am working on a proof of concept to do the following. Set up two image servers on separate LANs each of which has a Wireless Access Point. Configure a diskless laptop or tablet which can boot alternately from either network when the wireless adapter is switched and the machine is powered on.

Our target platform is a very paired down Win 98 or Win 2000 OS (whichever is easiest in the short term) which will run a Citrix client to provide application services. The goal is to demonstrate a secure machine that has no way for the user to save persistent data on the machine itself. Ultimately, we want to have a unit that can access different networks simply by turning off the machine and swapping the wireless adapter. Because of security concerns, this switching capability necessitates that the user cannot either intentionally or unintentionally copy data between these networks.

We are currently looking at Qualystems LAN-PC and Venturcom's BXE as potential servers for the clients in this demonstration. For the short-term, it's permissible to do a demonstration with the bootstrap being served off a floppy or other read-only media.

Has anyone seen anything like this done? The engineers at Intel and 3COM think it's not doable. However, I've seen some indication based on some whitepapers done by Texas Instruments that it *IS*. It all boils down to having DOS NDIS drivers that support the wireless card.

Any suggestions?

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Paradox Flakes, the breakfast of impossibilities

 

[dstell]

You are correct that you would have to have wireless card that would support DOS NDIS drivers for wireless.

As far as I know, no card supports this option.

I get a lot of questions from people who want to clone PCs across wireless in Enterprise situations using Ghost by booting DOS and connecting to a network drive and as far as I know, no one has informed me of a wireless card that has a DOS NDIS driver. Of course this is not a surprise considering the fact that wireless was not around when people were using DOS networking.

I do beleive that it is possible to develop a DOS NDIS driver. 3Com would perhaps be the best possibility because they have continued to do DOS NDIS drivers for the majority of both their mobile and desktop products for a long time now. I have seen no signs of them stopping this support because they realize how important this is to Enterprise level applications. I am suprised that they don't already have an NDIS driver for DOS for their wireless products.

Bottom line is I agree that it is possible, but unless you can get someone to develop a solution for you I don't see it happening.

I have passed this on to some of my Engineering friends at a couple of the wireless NIC vendors and have made the suggestion that this is a good application. I will let you know if any of them agree and start some sort of development.

 

[wcgrnway]

Thanks for your reply.

The search continues. I spoke with the folks at SMC and they seem to think it's doable. However, it's tech that needs to be developed.

A 3COM engineer told me that they were not looking at supporting DOS NDIS. Currently, the layer 1 and layer 2 support is all being handled at the windows level rather than at the DOS level. Apparently, according to him, the wireless comes up in 2 phases, in the first phase it hunts around for access points and other wireless devices, in phase 2 (Layer 2?) it actually establishes communication. According to him, the code to do this is harder at the DOS level. I have to scratch my head at this statement. I develop software as part of my job duties and developing low level code in windows is usually harder, not easier. You don't write network drivers in visual basic! =) I suppose it might be harder if there's no existing libraries of code to draw from to do the wireless protocols.

I'm going to poke around to see if maybe some linux guru might have made a driver for PCMCIA wireless. In that case, porting to DOS may be possible. Strange to have to go backward to go forward, but I've had to do stranger things to get awkward technology to work...



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Paradox Flakes, the breakfast of impossibilities