On Sat, 19 Oct 1996, Alexis Rosen wrote:
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?
I'm not suggesting that the ZIP be used while running the router, just to boot it up and create a RAM drive to run in. The advantage of the ZIP over the floppy in this scenario is that you don't have to compress and squeeze everything in order to modify the boot diskette. If you make a change to gated.conf it can just be copied to the ZIP drive and be ready to go in the event that the router needs to be rebooted.
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.
My floppy/ZIP boot scenario assumes that you would not be NFS mounting anything but that the router would be self contained. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com