Well, I'm working on documenting how to run LRP 2.9.8 with root on a HDD,
and it got me thinking about my CD booting images. One of the main things I
can't change on the CD is the size of the ramdisk, since that's a kernel
parameter, and I can't change kernel paramaters on a bootable CD without
re-burning a custom CD (a bad thing, especially for end-users). The
technique I'm using to run LRP off a HDD root partition is to acutally run
the LRP startup scripts in a chrooted environment, creating a root
environment that is then simply mounted at the next boot (linuxrc is
modified to just exit after loading bootstrap modules if root is set to
something other than the ramdisk).
This got me thinking....
A slight extension (and automation) of the process to build the root image
would make a nice installer to put LRP on your hard-disk for use as a thin
server.
A few more tweaks, and you could build root on the fly into /dev/ram1 (or
any other ramdisk besides /dev/ram0). This would allow on-the-fly
configuration of ramdisk parameters (including size and potentially
filesystem...a 1/2 Gig ext2 ramdisk LRP system anyone?).
Throw in a bit of work to allow an install script to build a boot floppy on
the fly (shouldn't really be a problem, with a whole CD to fill with kernel
trees, modules, and full blown binaries of tar, perl/python interpreters,
etc), and you could make a pretty nifty distribution. While the thin
firewall folks would need a CD along with their floppy, if they didn't have
to burn a custom CD to get things to work (but could just download an ISO
image or by one pre-burned), I don't think that would be too bad. It would
also be possible to automatically build 1 or 2 disk stand-alone images
directly from the CD...
Sound like a good idea to anyone else? This could be what enables Butterfly
to work for a large number of existing LRP users, especially if more
complicated 2 disk configurations could be created automatically...
Charles Steinkuehler
http://lrp.steinkuehler.net
http://c0wz.steinkuehler.net (lrp.c0wz.com mirror)
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