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:jkennethgentle@gmai...]
Sent: Friday, August 07, 2009 8:51 AM
To: Dillabough, Dave
Cc: Erich Titl; leaf-user@list...
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.Dillabough@bcge...<mailto:Dave.Dillabough@bcge...>> 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.titl@thin...<mailto:erich.titl@thin...>]
Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 2:40 PM
To: Dillabough, Dave
Cc: leaf-user@list...<mailto:leaf-user@list...>
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


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