WinAoE

WinAoE
Welcome to WinAoE
WinAoE is an open source GPLv3 driver for using AoE (ATA over Ethernet) on Microsoft Windows(tm).
It can be used to disklessly boot Windows 2000 through Vista 64 from an AoE device (virtual vblade or real Coraid device), or can be used as a general AoE access driver.

How to use WinAoE
Download the latest version below and read the readme.txt file.
For general AoE access it is sufficient to just install the driver (using "Control Panel", "Add Hardware", until I make an installer). After installing you can use the "aoe" command in a command prompt window to mount and unmount AoE drives (type "aoe" for a help screen).

For diskless booting, you also need to set up your network driver to start at boot in the registry (see the readme.txt for that). After this, you can image the drive to a vblade, or put it in a Coraid enclosure and boot over PXE, using either gPXE or the included aoe.0

Read the readme.txt for the latest information.

WARNING!
This is still an experimental driver, although it has been used flawlessly on my own system for the past 2 years (having been put through a few TB of data), it might not work for you!

Important! The 0.97f version implemented a new scheduler which appeared to be very slow. 0.97g fixes this. To update, copy the aoe32/64.sys to C:\Windows\system32\drivers and aoe.exe to C:\Windows\system32 and reboot. For questions feel free to visit the IRC channel.
Download: winaoe-0.97g.zip   (older versions)

More information and how to contact me
For more information and to contact me, the preferred method is IRC, the #etherboot channel on the Freenode IRC network. You can also reach me through this contact form (I don't post email addresses online), although I will only reply if it is absolutely necessary.

As a last note, if you would like to contribute patches to this driver, I only accept patches which are released under the public domain. Include a small header releasing the patch as public domain in order to do that. This is so that I would be able to relicense the driver for specific usage if the situation of some company demands that.
That being said, the driver itself will always be available through GPL, as that is the primary release license.

If you would like to contribute in any other way, please visit the irc channel or use the contact form.

Some useful links to helpful people and software
Etherboot/gPXE by Marty Connor (mdc) & Michael Brown (mcb30).
 The etherboot project is being used by lots of people to netboot systems all over the world.
The new and brilliant gPXE loader expands on the foundation of etherboot by adding in things like booting over http, booting over iSCSI and of course booting over AoE.
Thanks in general to mdc for the incentive to release this driver and generally keeping a good mood, and mcb30 for debugging and making gPXE compatible with booting Windows over AoE.
SYSLINUX by H. Peter Anvin (hpa).
 SYSLINUX is a very nice piece of work to boot a host of different systems.
It includes PXELINUX which can be used to make a PXE enabled boot menu, usable together with gPXE or WinAoE to choose between booting Windows or Linux over the network.
Also a general thanks for hpa with pointers and debugging.
Coraid.
 The inventors of AoE. They helped to make the release of this driver possible.
Do not contact them for support though, see above.

And lastly I want to thank my alpha/beta testers to find new and exciting bugs to fix! (you know who you are).

― V.

 

Installing Diskless AoE:

Server side setup:
To make it all work, you need Etherboot capable NICs, either getting Etherboot over PXE or from another media as a floppy.
We'll take the pure PXE road here, to use another media, you can ignore some setup steps here.
The example here uses an Intel pro 1000 card, change to reflect your own settings where needed.
Also, the example here is mainly based on a Slackware Linux server, but it should be very similar for other distributions.
For windows servers, scroll down.

1. make a tftpboot directory in /, add the aoe.0 file to it and enable the tftp daemon

mkdir /tftpboot
cp /path/to/aoe.0 /tftpboot
add the line "tftp dgram udp wait root /usr/sbin/in.tftpd in.tftpd -s /tftpboot -r blksize" to /etc/inetd.conf
/etc/rc.d/rc.inetd restart

2.a make an Etherboot zpxe image for your NIC on http://rom-o-matic.net/
   .. or ..
2.b download and unpack the Etherboot source package, compile the correct zpxe driver for your NIC and add the file to tftpboot

wget http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/etherboot/etherboot-5.4.2.tar.bz2
tar xfj etherboot-5.4.2.tar.bz2
cd etherboot-5.4.2
make bin/e1000.zpxe
cp bin/e1000.zpxe /tftpboot

3. edit your dhcp configuration to look like this:

    host Client {
      hardware ethernet 00:01:02:03:04:05;    # the mac address of your boot NIC
      fixed-address 192.168.0.3;     # your client's IP
      if substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9) != "Etherboot" {
        filename "/e1000.zpxe";      # the file made in step 2
      } else {
        filename "/aoe.0";      # aoe.0 file found in the archive
      }
      # next is root-path, this is dhcp option 17 (0x11) if you have to manually specify it.
      option root-path "aoe:e0.0";              # major and minor id of vblade
    }

4. restart dhcpd

killall -9 dhcpd
dhcpd

This concludes the server side setup.
The only thing needed besides this the target AoE device, for instance vblade or AoE hardware from http://www.coraid.com/
Vblade is an Linux software version of the latter.

Client setup:
On an installed system, install the AoE driver through "add new hardware -> choose -> SCSI"
After installing, go in regedit to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
There, search the key for the boot NIC (in the case of an Intel E1000 it would be E1000, the one in VMware is VMXNET) and change the "Start" key to 0 (boot).
The AoE driver will automatically load itself before atapi.sys, but it will only boot from a netboot disk if started from the net through aoe.0.
This means you can, for instance, install on a real hard disk, put the disk in a server or Coraid enclosure, netboot from it, and when you want to boot from it in a normal way (attached to the PC itself) you can put it back and let it boot as normal.

Client imaging in vblade:
The image to boot from can be any file or block device on the Linux server.
The driver will take the heads/sectors/cylinders automatically from the partition table, so any real or fake disk image will do (if there is no partition table, it will default to 63 sectors/track, 255 heads).
The easiest way to do get a workable block device is taking a hard disk of an installed system or a VMware full disk image, but also own made images, partitioned in Linux fdisk, will work.

There are a few ways to make an image, with the easiest being just taking a live working hard disk and using that block device, or making an image (with dd) from a working disk to a file on the Linux server.
Another handy way is to install on a small partition, dd the partition AND the 1st 63 sectors before that partition to a Linux block device (raid devices for instance), and lastly use the Linux ntfsresize util to expand it to the full device.
This option lets you store a small (4GB) file as a fast way to reinstall, yet have a big raid disk to install to.

Windows server:
All above steps concerning dhcpd and tftp could also be run on a windows server without any problems, check your manual how.However, vblade of course does not run on windows, so you must use either Coraid's enclosures, or find a working AoE windows target.
To counter these issues just use a proper server OS (Linux/BSD/other UNIX like systems).