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From: Robert Shady <rls@mail.id.net>
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Subject: Re: T1 upgrade options?
In-Reply-To: <82yb7edo5q.fsf@chimp.juniper.net> from Tony Li at "Jul 11, 97 00:49:05 am"
To: tli@jnx.com (Tony Li)
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 1997 08:28:00 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: spork@super-g.com, isp@FreeBSD.ORG
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> > Do you have any more info on "hard cards"?  I've not heard of this, but it
> > sounds like a perfect solution for routers/firewalls...
> 
> Indeed it is.  There are several manufacturers and the double density flash
> disks are now coming down in price so that this is a practical
> alternative.  Various vendors include SanDisk, M-systems, and Smart
> Modular.
> 
> The units emulate small IDE disks.  As they are flash, there is an issue
> about writing to them too many times, so you don't wanna swap if you do
> this.  Mounting the filesystems RO seems like the right thing to do.  And
> because they're small, cramming a distribution into it is interesting....

Yes, they are small, but even a 4MB card is plent to run routing services
off of.  There are several FreeBSD distributions out there that are 
"router floppies", where you fit everything you need onto a 1.4MB disk
(except for gated, which is our problem).  So you'd be in heaven with 4MB.

	-- Rob
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