GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother))

Mon Oct 21 11:07:42 UTC 1996

Michael Dillon writes:
> 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.

I've managed it on one floppy without compressing the kernel. Although I
won't deny that compression would give a lot of room to play around in.

> > 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.

My scenario doesn't run off the NFS mount, it just uses it (or ftp) to pull
files over. Then it runs from RAM.

If the router is totally isolated (all paths out are down) then it loses,
but in that case, what difference does it make?

/a