Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 15:03:49 -0600 (CST) From: Brennan Stehling <brennan@offwhite.net> To: freebsd-small@freebsd.org Subject: picobsd and alternatives Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0103011327280.10196-100000@home.offwhite.net>
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I messed with pico bsd recently and actually created my own kernel with
the FreeBSD sources as it explains.
So anyway, I am wondering if I can do more. I am a new consultant for a
company and while I wait for my first client I sit in a computer lab at
the office and wait. The computers are all set up with Windows and I am
thinking it would be great if I could boot them into FreeBSD and use a
full desktop interface. But everyone knows X would not fit on a floppy.
So this is my idea... perhaps a plan.
I could burn a large part of a BSD system onto a CD which is then
bootable. The CD would work with a floppy to get startup settings and
the a new floppy could be configured for every computer it goes with. The
CD would then need some modified startup scripts which would look for rc.d
scripts and /etc/*.conf files on the floppy and run and read them.
I would guess this could lend itself to all kinds of powerful
options. You could have a snapshot of an intranet website and freeze it
onto a disk and take it to an remote network and reboot a windows box into
FreeBSD for everyone to view the intranet locally.
The hump to get over is that a CD does not have write capability, but I
think a floppy can handle that. Sure you may not want to do logging to
it, but you may be able to fit a copy of /etc onto a floppy and configure
syslog to log to a remote location or to not log at all, since it is a
temporary install, that may be ok. If it is more permanent, syslog can be
adjusted to do it right.
One use that I want to have for it is to act as a firewall/router much
like PicoBSD, but this would be able to boot with a larger amount of data
storage, allowing for several kernel modules to be available. Then that
box could have several useful scripts to automatically load the ipfw.ko
and ipl.ko modules among others to do various things.
This would ultimately allow someone to set up an older computer with a
custom FreeBSD installation in the time it takes to burn a copy of the
original CD and then boot and customize the settings with the floppy.
Any thoughts on this? I have a feeling someone may have already thought
of this or has already done it. If so, I would be interested in helping
develop it further and promote it's use.
Now with so many people having both DSL and Cable modems at home along
with older computers they could easily get a copy of this FreeBSD on CD
and use it as a router for their own private network.
Brennan Stehling - software developer and system administrator
my projects:
home.offwhite.net (free personal hosting)
www.greasydaemon.com (bsd search)
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