[5463] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother))
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alexis Rosen)
Sat Oct 19 16:24:11 1996
From: Alexis Rosen <alexis@panix.com>
To: michael@memra.com (Michael Dillon)
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 16:23:05 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.93.961019113605.28345E-100000@sidhe.memra.com> from "Michael Dillon" at Oct 19, 96 11:47:27 am
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.
/a
