In the BIOS for my ASUS P4S533 motherboard there is the usual selection for the order in which devices are sought for a boot record when booting up. There is the floppy, the hard drives, and so forth, and also there is listed a "Network INT18 Device".

When choosing a board with the onboard LAN connection I had hoped to experiment with booting over a network and this suggested to me that this was going to be possible with this motherboard. But I haven't a clue where to start.

Am I mistaken that this choice implies a network boot? What else could it be? I've got DHCP configured with a host and MAC code ready. I've tried exposing a network share with a boot record exposed, but it doesn't seem to work.

Does anyone have any experience or clues as to how this is done? Is a boot floppy necessary? I thought a boot ROM on an NIC device was all that was needed and the option to choose the network device as boot source suggested to me this was already a feature of the onboard LAN.

SparceMatrix,
INT 18 probably refers to PXE (Preboot eXecution Enviroment). It's an Intel standard (part of their Wired for Management) for network booting which is part of Microsofts many PC standards (PC99, Designed for WinXP, etc.).

This looks like a great place to get it working with linux: http://www.kegel.com/linux/pxe.html. Check the "Using PXE to boot diskless Linux" section for walk throughs. This, of course, depends on your network interface having the BIOS code to do it. Sounds like it might.

The basics of booting w/ PXE is this.
BIOS calls PXE code
PXE uses DHCP to get info, and a filename to download
PXE uses TFTP to download a PXE executable (not the kernel)
The downloaded code is run, which then downloads the kernel (again with TFTP) and starts it.

Much of which is similiar to what the workstations do. Check the above link for better descriptions.

Hope that helps,
chris

Is there an easy way to find if it does have the BIOS code for it? Why would the option to boot from a Network device exist if it didn't refer to the onboard device?

The manual for this motherboard has a section on the BIOS where it shows that there is an option to enable the boot ROM. So, yes, the board does have an onboard boot ROM. I've tried it and everything appears to be in order.

Thanks to those who responded to my post.

Are you getting it to boot off the network yet?

Yes, I am using the pxe rpm package that comes with Red Hat 8.0 and have booted up using the PXEdaemon that is in the package. My final goal is to try an installation over my network.

Can you point me toward a network booting agent that works with the ASUS INT18 network loader. My system seems to think that there is a 'boot disk failure' without ever activating the MAC.

I'm not entirely sure what your problem is. I'll assume you have the same system as mine with an onboard LAN and a boot ROM. I think all you have to do is activate the boot ROM, not the INT18 device. I think that is something completely different. You have to find that place in the BIOS that activates the boot ROM, else you will not get your remote boot. In my motherboard, once that is activated, you get another menu on boot for the type of protocol you will use.