Network Cards

The Network interface card is what connects your computer to the local network. The Network interface card is often known as the NIC.

LTSP works fine with 10mbit, 100mbit and 1000mbit (Gigabit) cards. It works with both ISA and PCI cards, although it's a bit easier with the PCI cards, because they can be autodetected. The ISA cards require a couple extra parameters in dhcpd.conf.

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Configuring network booting

In order to boot an LTSP client, the terminal will initialize the NIC twice. The first time, the terminal needs to use the NIC to download a kernel. This first initialization can be done a couple of ways, outlined below:

1. Bootrom Option
2. PXE on card
3. Boot floppy or CD
   1. Rom-O-Matic

PCI Network Interface Cards

PCI cards should work without special options

ISA Network Interface Cards

ISA NICs usually are not equipped with a PXE ROM, so you are most likely to use them with Etherboot. Etherboot requires the NIC to be in "jumpered" (fixed address by setting switches or jumpers on the board) or "jumperless" (fixed address by software like RSET8029) mode, while Plug and Pray in most cases will not work. So please make sure to setup the card appropriately. Etherboot will then autodetect the required settings, but the Linux kernel will not, as auto-probing for ISA devices is not done. Instead, you need to hand the kernel a hint which NIC driver to load, and as the NIC needs to be initialised before any access to the lts.conf file is possible, this hint needs to be passed on the kernel command line.

Assuming you are using the ISC DHCP daemon Version 3, you should add those lines at the beginning of your dhcpd.conf:

option option-128 code 128 = string;
option option-129 code 129 = text

so that these two additional options are accepted by the DHCP daemon. If you leave those out, DHCP probably will refuse to start. Any configuration examples on the web that use option-128, but do not specify those option definitions probably apply to DHCP Version 2 (outdated for several years now) which recognized option-128 by default. It had other shortcomings and lack of flexibility, so going with V3 usually is a good idea.

In the host { hardware ethernet ... } section of the client it applies to, insert those two lines:

option option-128     e4:45:74:68:00:00;
option option-129     "NIC=ne IO=0x300";

where the option-128 is a "magic number" telling etherboot that this options are valid and should be respected. For clearing things up, it's not a MAC address, but rather a string äEth followed by the option parsing version number (happing to be 0.0 right now).

In option-129, you can give the NIC module name (ne is rather popular, meaning it is a so-called NE2000 compatible card; 3c509 is another popular one). Additionally you can give the NIC's io address (ioport) and the IRQ (interrupt line); which one is really needed depends on the NIC module to use. Giving the IO at least should be on the safe side, as it avoides any autoprobing.

Options allowed for Etherboot can be looked up in the Etherboot User Manual, at http://www.etherboot.org/doc/html/userman/a838.html

3Com 3c509

The 3Com 3c509 is a very popular ISA based network card. It works well with LTSP, but it needs to be configured properly. The following needs to be done, for the 3c509 to work:

1. You need to DISABLE the plug-n-play on the card. To do this, you'll need the 3com utility http://www.3com.com/products/en_US/result.jsp?selected=5&sort=effdt&sku=3C509&order=desc.
2. You'll need to add

         option option-128   e4:45:74:68:00:00;
         option option-129  "NIC=3c509";

to the dhcpd.conf file. More about option-128 can be found here http://www.etherboot.org/doc/html/userman/a838.html. Please be sure to read it.

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After configuring network booting

Once the terminal is able to start executing a kernel, the kernel itself will need to know what driver to load. If this cannot be autodetected, then the correct module will have to be listed in the lts.conf file.

PCI Network Interface Cards

PCI cards should be auto-detected by the LTSP kernel

ISA Network Interface Cards

You may have to specify which module to load via the dhcpd.conf file, see above.

-- JimMcQuillan - 07 Dec 2004

-- SteveSwitzer - 08 Dec 2004

-- AnselmMartinHoffmeister - 05 Jan 2005 (Adding option-128/129 information)