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 Most of the machien swill not have been replaced by then so we'll still have very few cdroms.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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