Charles Steinkuehler wrote:
> 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).
Huh? I don't understand.
You and others run just fine off of a MSDOS formatted hard disk to
which syslinux has been applied. I've a IDE RAM disk that boots
Oxygen right now, and it doesn't need a fancy chrooted environment or
anything else.
You must get something out of this unusual configuration and I'm just
too dense to see it.
> 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 simple script would be all it takes, with these steps:
0. For hard drives, partitioning is required....
1. Format it with MSDOS
2. Apply syslinux to it
3. Copy all boot floppy packages to it
4. Modify syslinux.cfg to use the hard drive.
> 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?).
You can do this now through the syslinux "boot:" prompt. I'm
constantly doing:
boot: linux vga=7
(sets the vga console screen to 132x24 or something like that...)
> 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.
Someone was going to do that once. It would be pretty nice to be able
to build your own boot disk, and ask questions all the way. Hmmm...
Every Oxygen disk comes with the ability to replicate itself -
including doing it from scratch: syslinux, mkfs.msdos, and others are
all included.
> 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...
As I said, it is a bit confusing as to what you are talking of...
My thoughts on bootable CDROM distributions are:
1. Bootable CDROMs have a FIXED image to boot from, and thus are
single purpose systems.
2. To make the bootable CDROM configurable, user input is required -
which isn't nice in an unattended router.
I've been leaning towards a CDROM/floppy combination: you can
configure the floppy all you want, then load packages from the CDROM.
I've also been considering (for a long time) using a CDROM to create a
TFTP and/or FTP and/or HTTP server with packages available; thus you
can put the CDROM in, boot, then go to another system, boot Oxygen on
it, and download all packages via the CDROM system on the network.
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