From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Apr 2 22:29:58 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.nbrewer.com (sparge.nbrewer.com [208.42.68.70]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0CF2437B71B for ; Mon, 2 Apr 2001 22:29:54 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from chris@nbrewer.com) Received: by mail.nbrewer.com (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 4951A383095; Tue, 3 Apr 2001 00:29:53 -0500 (CDT) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 00:29:53 -0500 From: Christopher Farley To: Paul Jansen Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: running from CD? Message-ID: <20010403002952.D35792@northernbrewer.com> Mail-Followup-To: Christopher Farley , Paul Jansen , questions@freebsd.org References: <20010402180248.4195.qmail@web5105.mail.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20010402180248.4195.qmail@web5105.mail.yahoo.com>; from vlaero@yahoo.com.au on Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 04:02:48AM +1000 Organization: Northern Brewer, St. Paul, MN Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Paul Jansen (vlaero@yahoo.com.au) wrote: > I know that there are some Linux distos that allow you > to do this - anyway enough of that :) > > Is it possible to run freebsd without a hard drive > instead accessing the required files off CDROM? I can > already boot machines diskless but there will be know > other machine on the network to be able to provide > files. I've got PicoBSD up and running but it's lack > of support for various cards is a problem for me. I > also wouldn;t mind being able to run apache and samba > from a CD. > I suppose you could use a write protected floppy to > provide machine specific setting. Temp directories > and things could be mapped out to MFS like they are in > the diskless config. > Can this be done? Has it been done? It certainly can be done. My copy of Greg Lehey's The Complete FreeBSD came with a 'live filesystem' bootable CD. You can get a lot of stuff onto a 700MB CD. I had once contemplated building a diskless firewall/gateway by burning such a bootable disk. It shouldn't be that hard to do. Having a read-only filesystem would certainly prevent undesirable-types from crashing your disks. -- Christopher Farley www.northernbrewer.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message