Network booting a linux based accesspoint?

How hard is it to get something running so that a linux box as an accesspoint can boot from the PXE boot loader built into most motherboards with onboard LAN and some PCI cards? Can they boot off a wireless card or would it need to be on a dedicated hardware UTP<->wireless bridge unit?

Once thats working, how hard would it be to get an accesspoint to serve up all the stuff for another one to boot.

If we could do that, then hopefully we could get the access points all booting up with no hard drives in them.

well u can boot a linux kernel off a single flopie eh dude with ya network drivers in it, and from their u can mount remote drives as ya filesystem but it could take along time and be kinda setchy.... when all ya really need is like a 200 meg hd for everything

Hi ya Richms,
The other day I picked up a 486 with floppy, NIC, 1x500mb and 1x2Gb hdd's if you havnt sourced yourself a Linux box yet, I would be more than happy to offer it to yourself to use on "permanent loan" apparently it works fine, I havnt tried to run it yet, give me a bell or drop by sometime if u would like it.
Ps. permanent loan = its yours to keep unless I even want it back (unlikely) in which case you return it, :-)

I grabbed a K6-200 at works bin-fest, Takes Ram that I can find so its got a stick of 128 in it.

The 2 gig drive may be interesting however. I will see how I get on with my 600 megger for stuff first.

Looks like the fab-corp order will be here before my omni so I may have to put the little yagi im getting from fab up first. Hows things looking for your end? Got anything up at all yet?

Not a lot of progress yet,
Still only have Avaya pc card for lappy, and that MN500 AP is a piece of crap that I'm gonna sell sooner or later if no-one else wants to have a go with it.
Other than that, am off to Sydney in a couple of weeks, so will return with a decent Omni and I am gonna get a hardware AP as its not gonna be worth my while to set up a linux box.
So will be rocking soon as, :-)

What are the problems you are having with the accesspoint?

Also, who can you connect to from there do you think? if its not likly to be more then me close by, you may be better off getting a cheap directional then a good onmi, then if anything else springs up over the other side of the harbour that you can see then you can set a second link up.

I dont hold a lot of faith in the WDS providing a massive amount of bandwidth, and the more we can move onto point to point links the better.

Some how the concept of everyone using omnis on the same channel doesnt spell fast to me.