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Date:      Sat, 15 Sep 2001 13:49:55 -0700
From:      "Chad R. Larson" <chad@DCFinc.com>
To:        Jordan Hubbard <jkh@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, Chad Larson <clarso@eldocomp.com>
Subject:   Re: Making a bootable disk2 from a make release?
Message-ID:  <20010915134955.A18734@freeway.dcfinc.com>
In-Reply-To: <20010915115221N.jkh@freebsd.org>; from jkh@FreeBSD.ORG on Sat, Sep 15, 2001 at 11:52:21AM -0700
References:  <200109151212.OAA69871@lurza.secnetix.de> <20010915214842.F1466-100000@sanctuary.magill.unisa.edu.au> <20010915115221N.jkh@freebsd.org>

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On Sat, Sep 15, 2001 at 11:52:21AM -0700, Jordan Hubbard wrote:
> Yes, it probably should do this since there's already an ISO
> target to create the 2nd ISO, and this is an important 1st step
> (which I forgot about for some reason).

Now that the 4.4-RELEASE thrash is settling down, I'd like to ask a
slightly different question.

Is there a write up or a cookbook on creating custom, bootable CDs?
I'm imagining something a bit like the Pico floppies, but without
the crunchgen and other space saving tricks.  Most machines these
days have CD-R drives and CD-RW are fast becoming wide-spread.
There's a large universe of machines that could use a CD instead of
a floppy to cold-start an application.

In my particular case, I need to build a farm of web servers that
serve up dynamic content generated in a JRun servlet container that
accesses a PostgreSQL database.  The JRun and PostgreSQL are running
on a Sun E3500, but the web servers will be FreeBSD/Apache.

Since the web content is dynamic, and generated externally to the
FreeBSD boxes, the web servers will be pretty static.  I want to
generate bootable CDs with our particular applications and utilities,
rather than worrying how to back them up and maintain them in the
Internet DMZ they'll live in.  It also makes a warm standby system
easier to manage.

The machines are in 1U boxes, with a hard drive, a floppy and a CD-R
drive, plus 2 Ethernet NICs.  The hard drive (you can't by anything
smaller than a couple of Gig these days) will provide storage of
configuration data that needs to survive a reboot, and swap space.
It's not clear to me if it would be better to copy binaries from the
CD to the hard drive on each boot, or just configure a large swap
space and let that happen on the fly as they are used.

Anyway, I think a tool set that allows the generation of such a
gizwhacky would be a useful addition.  Any pointers to a starter
set, or the information I'd need?  Seems like the portion of the
"make release" that generates the 2nd ISO would be a good starting
point, but with some configuration tools like Pico uses to decide
what all goes onto the bootable live filesystem.

> - Jordan

	-crl
--
Chad R. Larson (CRL15)   602-953-1392   Brother, can you paradigm?
chad@dcfinc.com         chad@larsons.org          larson1@home.com
DCF, Inc. - 14623 North 49th Place, Scottsdale, Arizona 85254-2207

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