John Baldwin wrote: > Or you can use PXE at your provisioning center and have the > BIOS setup to boot from the hard disk first, which will fail > for the initial boot and fall back to PXE. Then once the box > is installed you ship it to its destination.
This is a possibility; however, there are a number of system failure scenarios that make this undesirable. Specifically, it's desirable to support the idea of a fallback boot (e.g. "nextboot") for a partially functional system, to downgrade it automatically, and make it at least something other than a doorstop on which one has to pay international shipping. In your scenario, there's no possible reupgrade method. I understand that FreeBSD doesn't have a built-in graceful fallback mechanism, and that appliance vendors have had to, traditionally, "roll their own", but, for example, the Whistle InterJet had a fairly marvelous fallback mechanism, which did work really well, as long as you didn't try to do version insertion (that's a middle management problem, not a technical one). > We just launched a closed-box appliance yesterday. Actually, > it's going live to actual customers in about an hour and a > half, but I digress. :) You should shout it to the world... at least post a press release to -advocacy! -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message