GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother))

Robert E. Seastrom rs at bifrost.seastrom.com
Sat Oct 19 22:57:56 UTC 1996


   From: Alexis Rosen <alexis at panix.com>

   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? ZIPs haven't been around long enough to be
   sure of this, and HDs are pretty reliable these days.

I think his plan was to boot ramdisk unix from it and then to spin the
unit down.  Spun-down units are fairly reliable, and besides I think
the main thrust here was to replace the drive with something that
could be swapped easily for upgrades.

   Of course I'm not saying that I *Want* to use an HD in this situation; flash
   is clearly a big win. But I don't see how using a floppy or ZIP improves
   wins.

With cold-convenient-swappable IDE drawers that let even a
kindergartener swap out an IDE hard drive and high quality 100mb hard
drives available for like $50 (at this point you're probably paying
more for the snazzy mounting kit than you are for the drive), I
daresay the Zip and flash solutions are far too expensive for what
they buy you.  Take a look at the MTBF on your hard drives and then
look at the MTBF on power supplies and floppies, and gee... Alexis is
dead on here.  Pay more, get less...

And besides, as Paul Traina said a couple of years back on the topic
of BSDI boxes vs. Ciscos: "Hey, you can't play DOOM on those boring
old Cisco routers!"

                                        ---Rob







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