[K12OSN] Affordable Eprom source

[Timothy Legge]

Terrell Prudé Jr. wrote:
> Hardware don't grow on trees, Mel; unlike software, hardware costs money 
> to reproduce.  If you want a hardware solution, you gotta pay for it.  
> Jim McQuillan's saving you a ton already!  You want him to just *donate* 
> the chips to you on top of that?
> 
> Eighteen dollars--that's pocket change.  Take a small piece of that 
> truckload of money that you're saving by not going with MS 
> Windows/Office and use that to fund your EEPROM purchase.  Geez...!

While I agree that Jim is doing fantastic things and that supporting him 
however you can is a great idea $18 / eeprom is not cheap especially 
when you consider that it could be the single most expensive parts of 
some of the refurbished labs (excluding the server and network).

I spent the money for a Eprom programmer and an Eraser so I am able to 
take advantage used EPROMs from ebay ($1 for used 27C256) as well as 
this site:

http://www.futurlec.com/ICFLASH.shtml

That being said, for the number of EPROMS I have programmed, buying them 
from Jim would have been the cheaper route.

However, a number of Network cards can flash eeproms.  The 3c905C is one 
of those cards and is readily available pretty cheap:

http://www.vfxweb.com/index.php?productid=8006

I have purchased several from vfxweb and for some of them I got lucky 
and received cards with PXE built in.

When it comes to remote booting I look for:

1) PXE support for the onboard NIC
2) PXE on the card (these are cheap whn you find them)

Preprogrammed EEProms are for specific NICs (pci ids) and when you get 
into programming them yourself via a NIC you should have more time than 
money...

Tim