Jim Dixon writes:
Gated IMO is a good thing. The problem is the OS/hardware that it runs on top of. I would dred having to install something that needs a hard drive to route packets in a light-out POP.
You don't need a hard drive. Use some of the money you saved by not buying C***o to buy lots of DRAM. Boot from floppy.
Or even buy a flash-based hard drive emulator. Or combine the two solutions.
I've been thinking about this. A while ago I saw a product that emulated dual 1.4MB floppies in flash on an ISA card. This seemed like a good way to start. Has anyone actually tried this? What flash product did you use?
/a
--- Alexis Rosen Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix & Internet, NYC. alexis@panix.com
I've been thinking about doing this for a while now. The only product that I've found so far is made by a company called MCSI ((619) 598-2177) , but the only thing I've been able to get out of them so far is that the darn thing emulates a DOS filesystem through the bios, though they referred me to another company that does the firmware for their card, and claimed that this company could do custom firmware for me. I think MCSI has a card that emulates a dual floppy as well. I'd love a card that just provided a single raw drive emulations, even IDE would be fine, so I could just copy a whole bootable file sytem image into it, but I guess 2 floppy images would suffice. The card that emulated an 8mb DOS filesystem was only around $300. Rob