Eskimo North

We have a cluster of ~400 Linux machines that seem to need BIOS updates constantly. In the past, someone has had to spend a long day in the server room and boot the machines individually and hit a key to flash the bios, and then another key to reboot.

I just succeeded in getting a Linux box to reboot into DOS from Linux, run commands, and then reboot back into Linux. This was done without a DOS partition or external disk or drive by using a disk image file. I'm so friggin' excited about this that I thought I would come here and pull a "Fermat's Last Theorem" since I can't finish the documentation today ;^)

Not that I have a practical application from this but it seems so impossible I am really curious how you pulled it off?

The practical application for it is when you have a cluster of hundreds or thousands of computers running Linux and all of them need BIOS upgrades to fix a critical bug.

The steps are:

1. create a 4Mb bootable DOS floppy image
2. copy the flashing utility and the BIOS image to it
3. copy loadlin and your linux kernel to it
3.5. configure your boot loader and loadlin (waves hands) <- the hard part!
4. boot the image via memdisk
5. run some dos commands
6. run loadlin to drop DOS and reboot Linux

There are some fine points to the process. I am still refining it and will publish
the details soon. There are a large number of tools involved in creating the
necessary files to make it all work... A lot of steps to set it up the first time, but
then it's trivial to modify the DOS image after that.

Okay, here's full documentation:

http://inferno.slug.org/cgi-bin/wiki?Fl ... From_Linux