From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Dec 8 15:28: 6 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 69E7337B401 for ; Sun, 8 Dec 2002 15:28:05 -0800 (PST) Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BBCF743EB2 for ; Sun, 8 Dec 2002 15:28:03 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from grog@lemis.com) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id D55335190A; Mon, 9 Dec 2002 09:58:00 +1030 (CST) Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 09:58:00 +1030 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey To: Garance A Drosihn Cc: "Gary W. Swearingen" , FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: Interest in diskless booting? Message-ID: <20021208232800.GL96646@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20021208021835.GI96646@wantadilla.lemis.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i Organization: The FreeBSD Project Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ X-PGP-Fingerprint: 9A1B 8202 BCCE B846 F92F 09AC 22E6 F290 507A 4223 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message