IP-based method and apparatus for remote booting computers in wide-area-network environment

摘要

A method and an apparatus are provided to remote boot a diskless computer on a WAN and the are disclosed. The remote boot apparatus is constructed as an embedded interface in the computer. The remote boot apparatus has a bi-directional buffer, a central processor, a network interface, a boot ROM and an interface core routine. The remote boot apparatus intercepts normal disk read of an MBR issued by a system BIOS of a personal computer, and then redirects the disk instruction in a form of TCP/IP packet to a boot server to read a corresponded file block from a location of the server. After the file block is received and confirmed by the computer, the received file block is unpacked and supplied to boot the computer.