[Beowulf] BIOS

[Henning Fehrmann]

Hello,

we are interested in flashing a BIOS image and in manipulating the NVRAM of the motherboard 
automatically.

Unfortunately, using certain vendors, the access to the NVRAM is not straightforward.
These vendors are offering DOS tools only, to write in the NVRAM, hence, we have to boot
a DOS image and here starts the trouble.

Optimally, using the DOS environment does following things:
* flashes the BIOS
* sets the NVRAM 
* sends a message to the install server 

The last point is necessary to prepare pxeboot for the installation process.
It also means, we need networking under DOS.
In particular, we are looking for a DOS-DHCP client. Everything needs to be packed on
a 2,9M floppy image.

Has somebody experiences with this?

In the worst case, the DOS environment is working autonomously and the install server is 'guessing'
whether the BIOS is flashed or not on the clients,
e.g., by analyzing the DHCP logs, but this is not what we really want.

Regards
Henning Fehrmann