Netbooting across the internet

[Finisterre]

I'm not particularly fond of Raspberry Pi, but I do have a few dedicated servers that always run. Because of that I wanted to play around with NATing, or SSH port forwarding the Netboot port (10703) from the internet to my Naomi. Obviously pushing sub 200meg files around is not optimal in some parts of the world, it isn't awful in others where bandwidth is plentiful. It really isn't a big deal if you only do it from time to time, my load time was only 2 minutes to push Marvel Vs. Capcom.

# ls -alh ../MarvelVsCapcom2_unlocked.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 501 staff 137M May 17 2017 ../MarvelVsCapcom2_unlocked.bin

Stick this type of setup on an Amazon Web or similar, and you could hit the interface from any Smart Phone and pick a new game (once said interface was designed). You could in theory manage several machines remotely all with independent game selections, at the cost of a bit of load time.

There is no real interface for now, just me messing around to see if it was possible. Here is how I made it happen using remote ssh port forwarding.

Terminal 1:
$ ssh -R 10703:192.168.1.2:10703 root@mydedicatedserver "sleep 9999"root@mydedicatedserver password:

Terminal 2:
# git diff
diff --git a/netboot_upload.c b/netboot_upload.c
index 8693e92..20c16b2 100644
--- a/netboot_upload.c
+++ b/netboot_upload.c
@@ -92,12 +92,7 @@ int main(int argc, char **argv)

restart_host();

- printf("Entering infinite loop\n");
- while(1)
- {
- set_time_limit(10*60*1000); /* Don't hurt me if this still doesn't work. D= Just converting all from python*/
- sleep(5);
- }
+ printf("closing netboot tool");

}

# make
gcc -c crc32.c
gcc -c netboot_upload.c
gcc -O3 -Wall -o netboot_upload_tool crc32.o netboot_upload.o

(note that when ssh is running the remote port on my Naomi is forwarded to 127.0.0.1:10703)

# time ./netboot_upload_tool 127.0.0.1 ../MarvelVsCapcom2_unlocked.bin
Received: '0x04 0x00 0xffffff81 0x07 0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00 '
Uploading...
Address at: 0889b600
closing netboot tool
real 2m7.224s
user 0m2.868s
sys 0m0.380s

Naomi Console:
Should boot… check the image, and reboot into the game. I believe some games require periodic pings, but I've not yet encountered it. I commented out the infinite loop for now.

I'll let you know if I take this any further. Right now the firewall on my home router does not want to forward the port properly, so I had to use the SSH tunnel to test if the theory would even work.

 

[waiwainl]

Nice concept.
You should package it in a workable situation and put it up to github!