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Date:      Mon, 9 Dec 2002 09:58:00 +1030
From:      Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
Cc:        "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@attbi.com>, FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Interest in diskless booting?
Message-ID:  <20021208232800.GL96646@wantadilla.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <p05200f36ba1974ec3ec8@[128.113.24.47]>
References:  <20021208021835.GI96646@wantadilla.lemis.com> <mkwumkw7se.umk@localhost.localdomain> <p05200f36ba1974ec3ec8@[128.113.24.47]>

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On Sunday,  8 December 2002 at 17:36:51 -0500, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> At 12:54 PM -0800 12/8/02, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
>> I mostly-wasted a bunch of time investigating web sites and
>> articles which had schemes for diskless booting, and then
>> discovered that the "picobsd" manpage told me everything I
>> needed to know (to set up a non-harddisk filtering bridge
>> booting off a floppy) in a staightforward, non-confusing
>> manner.
>
> PicoBSD is great if you want to do what PicoBSD is geared for,
> but many people can think of their own custom systems that they
> would like to have burned on a CD-ROM.  Not "pico" small, but
> still much less than the full-blown freebsd, and does not require
> a working hard disk to run.  For those people, PicoBSD is *too*
> successful at being small.

Agreed.  Given the increase in size of the kernel in recent years,
it's difficult to get a kernel on a floppy, let alone other files.
CDs are hardly any more expensive, and you can put a complete system
on them.

> Besides, if you had a nice book with an accurate and detailed info
> on how to do build such systems, then you wouldn't have to waste
> any time searching those web sites...   :-)
>
> Another example of where this information is useful is for hardware
> like the small, diskless boxes at http://www.soekris.com/.  One of
> the CS grad students set up freebsd on a box like that, and gave a
> presentation of it at a local Unix users group, and everyone was
> very interested in what he had done.

This is one of the things that I was thinking of, from a software
side, but my primary interest was net booting with NFS-mounted file
systems.  I'll think about the CD system as well, but it seems that
this should be something that the FreeBSD project offers as an
additional CD.  It could replace the fixit floppy, which has become
almost useless.

Greg
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