These days, quite a few devices already come with built-in iPXE support: Some hypervisors (qemu, Proxmox, VMWare, VirtulBox, etc.) support iPXE right out of the gate but there’s also an increasing number of network equipment vendors that sell network interface cards with bundled iPXE support. But what if the bundled iPXE firmware is out of date and/or lacking a relevant… Read more »
These days mainboards usually come with some sort of wizbang tool that allow the user to update the BIOS from a USB drive or straight via network. Except, of course, that one single mainboard that absolutely needs a new BIOS version on a late Friday afternoon. And obviously the manufacturer only provides a flash tool for DOS and the mainboard… Read more »
To update the initrd.img to load additional drivers early in the boot process, normally you would simply run /sbin/mkinitrd and let the script do the work. But what if the initrd.img used during the installation of CentOS lacks an important driver? Maybe you want to netboot CentOS, but the initial ramdisk CentOS provides doesn’t have the right modules for you… Read more »
I already wrote a little article, how to boot a FreeDos via PXE. Of course, you can boot Fedora (or CentOS) in like manner.
Wanted to flash a BIOS lately and noticed that all major mainboard manufactors still use DOS flash utilities? I did. Unfortunately my mainboard isn’t supported by flashrom yet and a floppy drive wasn’t available. So, why not use FreeDOS?