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.
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
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.
I think his plan was to boot ramdisk unix from it and then to spin the
unit down. Spun-down units are fairly reliable, and besides I think
the main thrust here was to replace the drive with something that
could be swapped easily for upgrades.
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.
With cold-convenient-swappable IDE drawers that let even a
kindergartener swap out an IDE hard drive and high quality 100mb hard
drives available for like $50 (at this point you're probably paying
more for the snazzy mounting kit than you are for the drive), I
daresay the Zip and flash solutions are far too expensive for what
they buy you. Take a look at the MTBF on your hard drives and then
look at the MTBF on power supplies and floppies, and gee... Alexis is
dead on here. Pay more, get less...
And besides, as Paul Traina said a couple of years back on the topic
of BSDI boxes vs. Ciscos: "Hey, you can't play DOOM on those boring
old Cisco routers!"
And besides, as Paul Traina said a couple of years back on the topic
of BSDI boxes vs. Ciscos: "Hey, you can't play DOOM on those boring
old Cisco routers!"
Maybe someone is, and that is why so many routers are flapping.
