Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2004 14:29:38 -0700 From: Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org> To: Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org> Cc: "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd@over-yonder.net> Subject: Re: Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x Message-ID: <3FFF1D42.90408@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0401091252150.48456-100000@InterJet.elischer.org> References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0401091252150.48456-100000@InterJet.elischer.org>
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Julian Elischer wrote: > > > > On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Matthew D. Fuller wrote: > > >>On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 11:50:59PM -0800 I heard the voice of >>Avleen Vig, and lo! it spake thus: >> >>>While it is indeed true that most machines since 1997 will support this >>>CD format, please take in to account: >> >>And, further, some of us don't have (and don't want) CD burners, and even >>if we had 'em, don't want to burn (no pun intended ;) a CD blank just to >>install an OS, when we can just (re-)use 2 floppies and do it across the >>LAN from a local FTP mirror, which is as fast as a CD drive anyway. >> >>It seems to me that we could split more out into modules, and/or add more >>disks of modules (maybe categorize a "storage device" modules disk, a >>"network drivers" modules disk, etc, keeping just the more common devices >>in the main kernel). Last I saw, the current system only created a >>single modules disk, which was a godsend to a kernel overflowing one >>disk, but as we add more and more stuff becomes another, albeit larger, >>noose. > > > Here at Vicor, we have over a thousand machines spread over about > 20 sites. About 10 of those machines have cdrom drives. Our plans call > for moving from 4.x to 5.x, probably at the end of 2004, maybe early > 2005. Most of the machien swill not have been replaced by then so > we'll still have very few cdroms. > Luckily this would probably not be an issue for the upgrade, but > the Custommer Engineers (CEs) need to be able to rebuild machine quickly > in the case of disk failures or other problems. They use floppies at the > moment for this. > > I could immagine that a floppy that did a net-boot might > be a possibility, but retraining them to do things differently is > always a problem. > > Can these machines netboot/PXEboot? In any case, there looks to be some prospects for someone stepping forward to help with floppies. If Vicor wants to help out too, that would be wonderful. Scott
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