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Pre-Grant Publication Number: 20080162919

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Discussion (5)

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Kid Stevens (4 months ago)

At KP Corporation in Denver I managed multiple odd systems from DOS to Macintosh. On the public server I set Boot images for the machines. Each machine that could receive an email would get a script that pointed to the latest boot image for that machine type. Opening the email would then execute the script in DOS and Windows which would write the boot info into the OS. On the Macintoshes the script would have to be manually executed by the user and this would point the machine to the right image for the next boot.

In reality this is not a new idea in any form as email is too slow to move large images. The system would still relies on some other network protocol to finish the job. In my case it was aliases pointing the OS folder to the network OS folder.

Ronald Pilcher (2 months ago)

Agreed. In whole this sounds more like a mirror system used in most of the colleges for the classroom systems. As such, it is already in use, not a new or inovative way to accomplish the idea.

Diane Willis (about 1 month ago)

I'm in agreement too. Do you know of any documentation on these procedures that could be posted in Prior Art to be passed on to the patent examiner.

Igor Naumov (4 months ago)

The essence of this application is the replacement of the TFTP protocol usually used in network boot process with another protocol, which the inventor refers to as "messaging".
Almost all of the other steps involved in the claims (like selecting a boot image server, verifying a local boot image, etc) are standard features of DHCP, PXE and BIOS.

Using alternative protocols in network boot process has been done before (e.g. see booting over HTTP at http://etherboot.org/wiki/httpboot ).
In my opinion, the only original claim of the application is changing TFTP protocol to another protocol like SMTP (which may not have been done before due to obvious performance reasons).

The main problem with the application is that it fails to define which specific "messaging" protocols are covered by the claims. In the absence of a definition of "messaging" protocols the application becomes too broad by covering any and all present and future transfer protocol that may be used in delivery of a boot image. Technically any network protocol can be considered as "messaging" since it is used for delivery of "messages" (which may be UDP or TCP packets).

Ian Shields (4 months ago)

Agreed. Besides the use of HTTP with gPXE in the Etherboot project (documented as early as 2004-03-23 (http://osdir.com/ml/network.etherboot.user/2004-03/msg00055.html), other protocols have been used for remote boot or remote IPL (RIPL), including NETBEUI during the 1990's. All communicatiosn protocols send messages, so the claim to use a "messaging protocol" without any definition of same, is borad enoguh to cover all existing network boot methods, without any novel feature being added.

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