LS Pro and NetWare Remote Booting with RPL

As documented in the LS Pro Owner's Handbook, remote booting is now achieved by using the accepted RPL specification (Ethernet RPL for 82596 Ethernet based systems, and Token-Ring RPL for Token-Ring based systems).

The RPL specification is already used by a number of Network Operating System vendors (for example, Microsoft's LAN Manager uses RPL). Novell have also recently revised their remote booting technology to fully support the Ethernet RPL specification. The only problem with this is that NetWare 3.11 was not shipped with Ethernet RPL remote booting as a standard feature.

Novell have recently released to us a new RPL server module that enables the use of the LS Pro as a remote boot workstation. This update has been placed onto the Apricot Technical Support bulletin board system, in file area 37, in a file called 596RPL.ZIP (27192 bytes).

The archive also contains a file called INSTALL.DOC. This file explains how to implement RPL remote booting for use with the LS Pro.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

The LS Pro cannot currently be used to remote boot via RPL to a NetWare 2.2 (or 2.x) server.

In order for RPL to work with NetWare, the server needs to be able to use either ETHERNET_802.2, or ETHERNET_II frames. With NetWare 3.11 (or 3.x), this is not a problem, as multiple frame types can be defined for the same LAN card. With NetWare 2.2 (or 2.x) however, only one frame type can be used per card, and so remote booting to a NetWare 2.x server is not, as yet, possible onto a server with a single LAN card. Novell are aware of this problem, and as soon as we receive a solution to this problem, we will make it available.

----------oOo----------