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

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