On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 17:12, Ken Gentle wrote:
Write protecting the Floppy is a feature I value (I routinely use
it). I would not change firewalls just because I couldn't use a floppy for
the configuration.
I use uClibc Bering to protect my business and home networks; The
write-protect is a little bit of extra reassurance that I can get back to
exactly the configuration I had if a compromise of either network occurred.
I've never needed to do so.
However, I think we're off topic - the real requirement question is this:
Is a LEAF distribution required to fit on and boot from a 1.44Mb floppy?
My personal opinion is that booting from CD is great. However, I haven't
tried to put LEAF distros in teeny, tiny, minimal hardware architectures.
LEAF has always been a very small distribution and should continue with
that goal.
What is the smallest non-disk media in use these days? 2Mb? 4Mb? Find
that number and set that as the max size for a LEAF distro.
FWIW
Ken
On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 12:35, Dillabough, Dave
dave.dillabo...@bcgeu.cawrote:
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:jkennethgen...@gmail.com]
*Sent:* Friday, August 07, 2009 8:51 AM
*To:* Dillabough, Dave
*Cc:* Erich Titl; leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net
*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.dillabo...@bcgeu.ca
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.t...@think.ch]
Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 2:40 PM
To: Dillabough, Dave
Cc: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net
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.
