Ron sez -
> > One advantage of IDE over DoC is that it's trivial to initialise on > > any hardware. I probably wouldn't want to change the kernel and > > minimal root that often, but I might want to update other software > > frequently. So one might have a kernel+root in a DoC, and then an > > application on an IDE drive. > > Yes this is an interesting idea. The big problem is that per Mbyte IDE > flash is still pretty expensive. Not a big problem for small capacities. I'm thinking of e.g. someone updating one cluster master with a small IDE device so that other cluster members can pull their local storage from it. We have some nodes with an IDE connector on the outside, originally to connect a CD. An alternative is a USB solid state "disk" - these work nicely with Linux, and I take it that there are no "spin-up" issues. :) USB has the advantage of being (hot) pluggable from the back (and occasionally front) of just about *any* box. Does LinuxBIOS play nicely with USB? It also has the advantage, for servicing, that one can connect e.g. a keyboard or a laptop via a USB-USB "net". Maybe e.g. a palmtop via its USB cradle? > you can flash your flash on the card you got and use flash for linuxbios > now. But an ASUS mainboard will have the usual asus differences, and I > don't know if we have linuxbios on that or not. Thanks for the warning, but - "usual" differences? The archives of this list seem to yield a miscellany of rants from Ron about ASUS brokenness. Are the idiocies random or is there a warped logic? I also note Ron's comments that once working, ASUS boards are quite good. :) I would send you the result of /sbin/lspci, but unfortunately, said box has now died, so we'll have to wait until it's fixed/replaced. It's an ASUS CUSC rev 1.05, for what that's worth. http://www.digit-life.com/articles/asusterminator gives a description. It would be a great development box if we can get it to work. The case is nicely designed, and the board very compact. No BIOS socket (to be expected, I guess), so no easy addition of a DoC. In this case, maybe a skinny LinuxBIOS (with Etherboot?) in the flash which boots a kernel on some other media would be a start.
