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I can explain this one! 1) It's a proprietary adapter because the laptop's too slim for an RJ45. 2) It's onboard because you can't PXE boot it from Wi-Fi 3)
by scott_karana 12y ago
I can explain this one!
1) It's a proprietary adapter because the laptop's too slim for an RJ45.
2) It's onboard because you can't PXE boot it from Wi-Fi
3) External USB docks/NICs could also fix #2, but since each dock/NIC has a distinct MAC, you can't have a nice 1:1 MAC:Workstation relationship for provisioning via PXE anyways
#2 and #3 are what prevented our company from bulk-ordering the first generation as our go-to office laptop, since its lack of on-board ethernet wouldn't work cleanly with MS SCCM, which was a shame, since it hit every other need pretty perfectly.
- rogerbinns 12y ago> It's onboard because you can't PXE boot it from Wi-Fi That isn't a technical limitation of Wi-Fi or PXE. For it to work the Wi-Fi has to be setup as part of the pre-boot environment (BIOS/UEFI). For example as far as I can tell my Mac mini can do this. Given that Lenovo like to pull authorization stunts with internal wifi cards (refusing to work with models that aren't blessed) they could make this work.
- scott_karana 12y agoYup! Lenovo could have done it, but didn't implement it. Admittedly, there's not a standardized way to do it either: Macs actually save Wi-Fi AP details into SMC or NVRAM (can't recall which) which is why wireless connectivity is accessible without setup when in the BIOS and recovery modes, but there's no analogous part in standard IBM-compatible PCs. Speculating, but this avenue could hypothetically be a security issue too if it's not secured well: attackers could extract confidential AP details without having to bypass full-disk encryption, or attack live RAM.
- wereHamster 12y ago"... but there's no analogous part in standard IBM-compatible PCs." EFI variables are persistent and accessible from the pre-boot environment.