Proof of concept: Network bootdisk and installer for real hardware
 

Hi everyone!

I have been doing some experiments with a network bootdisk for my Amigas where I'm able to get packages from Aminet and other sources even with a blank harddrive, setting the system up from scratch, using only a single floppydrive.

The goal was to use as little resources as possible to see if I got it working, and it seems like i works fine, and I'm even able to install AmigaOS3.1 over the network using only http and a few other tools mentioned in the video below.

I know I could of course just prepare my systems on WinUAE, but I'm most of the time just using real Amiga hardware anyway, and it's kind of fun just to see if it works :)

The concept here is that there is an ENV-variable which contains the url to the repository server.
If you pass a packagename to this system, it will look for two things:
- The package containing the program you want to run/install
- A custom script written to automate the installation/dearchiving process

In this way I'm able to store these things on my local webserver and modify the scripts from there, boot the Amiga, and click on the package-name in the list.

When experimenting with real hardware, it's good to be able to install those essential packages in a controlled simple way. For example I sometimes need MUI, IBrowse, Dopus, MagicWB or whatever which makes the basic system for me.

Again... this is just for fun! :spin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWL9ELLa_wM

that’s cool as crap. sort of like the internet recovery on mac or the netinstall isos in linux. maybe you could partner with roadshow or the 3.2 team and deliver a bootable floppy image that connects to a remote repository to install workbench... i mean the proof of concept is there, gj :)

This is fantastic, and has so much potential. Great work, well done!

Instead of downloading and installing the ADFs, would it be possible to just download the individual files as required from the disks, thus requiring much less resources and making it hopefully practical for a system such as an A600 or A1200 with only 2MB chip, a HDD to install onto and a PCMCIA network card?

Excellent work. Maybe you could develop this with a further automated script that has the relevant set up you require? Everything that can be done via command line is usually easier for this purpose.

This could work on a stock A1200 and A600 be it much slower. You could improve speeds and free up RAM by reducing bitplanes or even running this "silently" where GUI is removed.

I did something very similar on a laptop once using a TFTP server and PXE boot to install Windows.

Thanks alot everyone :) Glad you liked it.

And yes, this first version is developed on my A3000 with loads of RAM and CPU, but I always had in mind that this should run on my A1200, and maybe even the A600.

The system is the same, only the network card driver should be the difference. So using cnet.device should make it work on the A1200 with a PCMCIA-card.

Any A1200 with 4MB fastram should definitely work fine. 2MB stock A1200 I'm a bit unsure of, but that's my ultimate goal,yes :)

Can't wait to get my AmigaOS3.2 CD now, I have to see if it's possible in some way to boot the iso via some network-features... I have some ideas, and have experimented with 3.9 already so....who knows :)

Fantastic work. I got that «apt-get» feeling :)

Funny enough I made an emergency boot floppy last week. Roadshow, smbfs, hdtoolbox & lha easily fit on a 880k floppy. From there I can rebuild my hard drive if the worse happens.

Yeah, I've been down that route too, nogginthenog.
smbFS is a really good tool for this purpose, and that may be a part of the solution for installing CD-based systems by mounting the ISO over SMB. I've tried it, and it works fine.

When I made this disk however, my focus was to try to not use more than one technology on the serverside. And http can be used more safely even over the internet.

Another approach is to use FTPmount as I'm then able to mount the FTP-directory as a volume in AmigaOS. It works fine too for installing simple things.

But I think that the key to everything of this is UHC-Tools with aget and aminetsearch/aminetget. Those are really powerfull tools in these minimalistic environments.

Yeah, I've also made such thing in the past (NetworkBootDisk), but automatic installation through a such thing is even cooler :)

This is what I used! :) great tool for testing my PCMCIA ethernet

Ahh there you are jPV....
Yes I actually did get some inspiration from that disk a long time ago. Great work by the way!

The first attempt I did was based around AmiTCP3 which did not have any DHCP-support, and you had to fiddle around with setting static IPs on your Amiga, entering gateway, DNS and so on....

This is quite interesting! Would this ever make it into a distributable form, even if licensed pieces of software like Roadshow had to be supplied by the end user on the final image?

It depends, I would really like to release it to the public, but I guess all this licensing is a minefield I'm not capable to get a overview of on my own.
I think the first problem is including a stripped down part of Roadshow Demo on this disk, and maybe some of the network card drivers, I don't know.

Of course, it can't out of the box be able to download AmigaOS in any of it's kind over the internet either. That would be up to the user to configure where the source of that would be....

....or else I might find myself sitting on a chair in court next to Cloanto and Hyperion :D

I have done some improvements after this video, supporting multiple networkcards, installation of AmigaOS3.1.4 and experimental support for AmigaOS3.2 too...