nanog mailing list archives
Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother))
From: Rob Liebschutz <rob () rjl com>
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 96 15:24:10 PDT
Michael Dillon writes:You can also try building a machine with a boot device like the 2.88 megabyte floppies. Using the same techniques FreeBSD uses for their boot disks, you can decompress the boot floppy into a large RAMDISK and run that way. Or simply use a ZIP drive for the boot device but run from RAM as before. It's not as good as 100% solid state but it comes pretty close.This isn't clear to me. Why do you assume a ZIP is likely to be more reliable that a hard disk? ZIPs haven't been around long enough to be sure of this, and HDs are pretty reliable these days. Of course I'm not saying that I *Want* to use an HD in this situation; flash is clearly a big win. But I don't see how using a floppy or ZIP improves wins. FWIW, I suspect that building a 1.4MB fs that can boot and then nfs-mount (or ftp to a memory fs) needed binaries would be not a lot harder for FreeBSD or BSDi than it was for NetBSD.
Not really, the BSDI installation procedure does it with one floppy. The BSDI bootstrap knows how to load a gzipped kernel image. I've made modified boot disks from their installation procedure. I've never turned on NFS though, and admittedly it's all packed in there tight enough that every time I want to do something else I'm deleting one thing to add another. An 8mb flash card for $300 would be very nice if it worked. Rob - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Current thread:
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)), (continued)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Pritish Shah (Oct 21)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Daryn D. Fisher (Oct 21)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Michael Shields (Oct 21)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Nathan Stratton (Oct 21)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Peter Galbavy (Oct 21)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Alexis Rosen (Oct 21)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Alexis Rosen (Oct 19)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Vadim Antonov (Oct 19)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Robert Sanders (Oct 19)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Alexis Rosen (Oct 21)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Rob Liebschutz (Oct 19)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Neil J. McRae (Oct 21)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Rob Liebschutz (Oct 19)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Craig A. Huegen (Oct 20)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Rob Liebschutz (Oct 19)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Vadim Antonov (Oct 21)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Alexis Rosen (Oct 21)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Peter Galbavy (Oct 21)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) dave o'leary (Oct 27)
- Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother)) Peter Lothberg (Oct 28)