From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Aug 12 13:14:14 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id NAA14369 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 12 Aug 1996 13:14:14 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id NAA14331 for ; Mon, 12 Aug 1996 13:14:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id NAA25950; Mon, 12 Aug 1996 13:08:58 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199608122008.NAA25950@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: webbox with bsdi To: fyeung@netific.com (francis yeung) Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 13:08:58 -0700 (MST) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <199608121142.LAA29783@fyeung5.netific.com> from "francis yeung" at Aug 12, 96 11:42:38 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > The WebBox is a standalone BSDI system designed for > personal web browsiing on TV. It contains no > hard disk and has a CD drive. > > Is there a way that I can generate a standalone FreeBSD > without hard disk ? Yes; you will need to ROM the text portion of the kernel image, and ROM-with-load-to-RAM-on-startup the data. The kernel load address will need to be the ROM address after the segment register load. This is typical configuration for any ROM'able kernel for any system. > What should I do with the swap space area ? Just don't have one. This will limit your memory the the amount of real memory available. > Is there a virtual disk system (memory based) in FreeBSD ? Yes. > If there is a one, can I assign the swap space to a file which > resides in the virtual file system ? No. The RAM disk is subtracted from the available virtual memory (which is the available real memory + the available swap). In this case, there would be no difference between real memory and the RAM disk. It probably wouldn't work anyway -- it would be recursive. > I have no intention to build a web box. But I want to create > a floppy disk with a very small kernel which will run tcpdump > so that I can use it as standalone traffic monitor to be used > by the school for monitoring student's network traffic. > It has to be standalone system and should NOT be downloaded from > the network. Basically, the system gets booted up from the floppy > disk and starts traffic monitoring. Replace one or more of the utilities on the install disk; this should do what you want. We do this locally, though we use a netboot to do it instead of using a floppy. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.