GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother))

Sat Oct 19 20:28:02 UTC 1996

On Sat, 19 Oct 1996, Alexis Rosen wrote:

> Michael Dillon writes:
> > You can also try building a machine with a boot device like the 2.88
> > megabyte floppies. Using the same techniques FreeBSD uses for their boot
> > disks, you can decompress the boot floppy into a large RAMDISK and run
> > that way. Or simply use a ZIP drive for the boot device but run from RAM
> > as before. It's not as good as 100% solid state but it comes pretty close.
> 
> This isn't clear to me. Why do you assume a ZIP is likely to be more reliable
> that a hard disk? 

I'm not suggesting that the ZIP be used while running the router, just to
boot it up and create a RAM drive to run in. The advantage of the ZIP over
the floppy in this scenario is that you don't have to compress and squeeze
everything in order to modify the boot diskette. If you make a change to
gated.conf it can just be copied to the ZIP drive and be ready to go in
the event that the router needs to be rebooted.

> FWIW, I suspect that building a 1.4MB fs that can boot and then nfs-mount
> (or ftp to a memory fs) needed binaries would be not a lot harder for FreeBSD
> or BSDi than it was for NetBSD.

My floppy/ZIP boot scenario assumes that you would not be NFS mounting
anything but that the router would be self contained.

Michael Dillon                   -               ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael at memra.com