System information

Planning Considerations
57
Peer boot is a new function that allows multiple IBM Network Stations to boot
from a single Flash card located in a local Network Station. The performance
of Network Stations utilizing peer boot is very acceptable. Up to ten Network
Stations peer booting simultaneously from a single Flash card were tested
with very good results.
Because of the current size limitations of the Flash cards, it is not possible to
store all of the code required to start and operate the Network Station on a
single card. The largest and most static files are placed on the Flash card
such as the kernel and executable modules. User configuration data, fonts
and other slightly more volatile files (files that may change periodically) are
loaded from the central server. Using this split boot technique, the system
administrator can maintain configuration files from a central location using the
IBM Network Station Manager program.
The management of the data on a Flash card is time-consuming and is not
yet automated. There are no tools provided to synchronize the files on the
Flash card with those on the server or even to indicate when the files on the
Flash card are down-level from some designated configuration. In fact, the
files within the Flash card (local) file system, have no timestamps. Therefore,
it is not easy to tell which version of each software module is on the card.
To update the card while it is in the Network Station, it must first be
NFS-mounted to a server and then the new files copied (at two minutes per
Mbyte) to the card. If the link goes down or the card fills up, the card could be
left in a partially-updated state.The Network Station is unusable until a
correctly-formatted card is obtained.
For this reason, when updates are required, we recommend that you send a
new Flash card to the necessary sites. The obsolete cards can be returned,
reformatted, and Flashed again at a central location. This makes the Flash
card very similar to CDROM from the administrator's and user's perspective.
This arrangement works well as long as the environment is rather static and
frequent updates are not required.
2.11 CISC and RISC Co-existence
The IBM Network Station Manager license program for AS/400 V3R2M0 is
5648-B06. All AS/400 internal references to this product, however, are
denoted as 5733-A06. This code runs on CISC AS/400 systems.
There are two different levels of the IBM Network Station Manager license
program that can be installed on AS/400 systems running V3R7M0 and
above. They are the 5648-BOM (5733-AOT in GO LICPGM) (R2.5) and the