Ken, Is the fact that you can write protect the floppy a consideration (and do you do this) or is it just the convenience of having one around
Dave ________________________________ From: Ken Gentle [mailto:jkennethgen...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, August 07, 2009 8:51 AM To: Dillabough, Dave Cc: Erich Titl; leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin I still use floppies for config files. It is the easiest configuration for a software geek to mangle together - take a floppy off an old system, plug in the IDE cable and you're in business. My earliest LEAF systems (Dachstein and uClibc Bering) ran completely off of the floppy (on a 486DX w 16Mb of RAM) I'm interested in the CF media or moving off old PC platforms to something like the Alix platform. But that is a lot of hardware/low level software learning curve. Having said all that, I do boot my current systems from CD and just save configuration to floppy. I believe that would work nicely with a 2.6 kernel. Ken ------------------------------------------------------------ On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 18:39, Dillabough, Dave <dave.dillabo...@bcgeu.ca<mailto:dave.dillabo...@bcgeu.ca>> wrote: Hi Erich, How much of an issue is having write protection? I can understand that it is better in theory but I can't think of a commercial firewall product (Cisco PIX, Linksys, DLink etc) that does not use flash and that has any sort of write protection. If having boot from R/O media is an issue you could boot from CD and save to a floppy. You could also write protect CF media with a hardware hack to the cable. With USB/CF systems I always keep a backup of the boot media. It's not as simple as a power cycle but I can always get back to a known state if I need to although this has yet to be an issue for me. So from my perspective this would seem to be a non issue for most users and that for those few where it is an issue there are ways around it with some extra work. Obviously I don't have your perspective on the issue and I may be in the minority here and while I don't need 2.6 features yet it does seem to me that there must be quite a lot of development work that goes into squeezing a working system onto a floppy. It would be a shame if this is being done to no purpose. Does anyone on the list boot a system from floppy disk or save config files to floppy disk? I will take a look at the 2.6 CVS. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Erich Titl [mailto:erich.t...@think.ch<mailto:erich.t...@think.ch>] Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 2:40 PM To: Dillabough, Dave Cc: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net<mailto:leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net> Subject: Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin Dave Dillabough, Dave wrote: > I'm wondering how much of an issue it is to have a system that will fit on a > floppy. I would think that being able to boot off of a USB drive or a CD/USB > combo would be more pertinent today given as few machines even come with a > floppy as standard equipment anymore. USB booting would eliminate the > futzing around with non standard disk sizes and would be a lot more reliable > and as well. I have been running some variant of LRP/LEAF since the 2.x days > both at home and for various work related uses and the most common failure is > mechanical i.e. drives or fans. I switched to booting off of CF cards and > fanless power supplies a couple of years ago and am much closer to my goal of > having a solid state appliance that I can install and ignore. Even buying > the smallest CF cards available I still need only a small fraction of the > card to boot LEAF. The world has moved on from the floppy drive and I think > trying to keep future versions of LEAF small enough to boot from a floppy is l argely an artificial constraint now. If for some reason the use of a floppy is required then older versions of LEAF are still available. do not misinterpret me, I wrote an early HOWTO about using secure flash disks for leaf :-( and yes, I agree, I live easily with the flash memory world. There are 2 main things that are different from a floppy - size - write protection In my eyes, the write protection is the more important factor. There have been multiple attempts to solve this, amongst it unloading the device driver. There has been a experimental 2.6 release on CVS which was hardly used by anyone, hey, this is an open source project, get your hands dirty. cheers Erich ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july ------------------------------------------------------------------------ leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net<mailto:leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july ------------------------------------------------------------------------ leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
