Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
I used LEAF from version 2.x on an IDE flash adapter since my first installation, using Eric's instructions. Thanks, Eric! To persuade my first flash to boot was a long lasting pain for me, especially the boot process, but it was worth every minute of it. Later, moving on to a real solid state platform, like Soekris, was another effort with a serial console. PC Engines WRAP board gave me some more trouble than Soekris. But all of it was rewarded with a great feeling thet there are no mechanical parts involved and that the power consumption was only about 4W. Today, setting up a flash installation, either into a CF or into a DoM module, is a breeze. Especially on mini-ITX boards with VGA consoles. Therefore I warmly recommend moving into the flash world. Using well documented LEAF procedures from the Net, setup can be saved into a different partition on a flash, for more security. Removing IDE or SCSI drivers from RAM disk enables the flash installation to be less accessible to an intruder. And keeping the installation in a RAM disk prevents the flash from wearing out by frequent writing to it. Moving into flashes, enables also more sophisticated applications on the LEAF platform. I am still using Dansguardian, which is free licensed for home use, on 2.x platform and I am sorry it has not been compiled for 3.x platform. On another box I am running a remote NAS through OpenVPN, all running from flash. Here I'd appreciate if Power Management module was available for the kernel in LEAF. Yet another LEAF box serves me as a solid state web server. LEAF in a flash is a brilliant platform. :-) Tom snip === 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. snip === snip === do not misinterpret me, I wrote an early HOWTO about using secure flash disks for leaf :-( and yes, I agree, I live easily with the flash memory world. There are 2 main things that are different from a floppy - size - write protection In my eyes, the write protection is the more important factor. There have been multiple attempts to solve this, amongst it unloading the device driver. snip === -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
While the LEAF project goals may not include the word floppy, and even taking into account the LRP history, there are a lot of posts in the archives discussing the need/perceived requirement to keep the Bering (and Bering uClibc) minimal runnable configuration small enough to fit on a floppy (maybe a non-standard 1.6Mb, but still on a floppy). My question, Is a LEAF distribution required to fit on and boot from a 1.44Mb floppy? was more rhetorical in nature, intended to spur discussion to get the real requirements figured out. Ken On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 04:18, Gordon Bos gor...@q-ry.nl wrote: Mike Noyes wrote: -snip- Is a LEAF distribution required to fit on and boot from a 1.44Mb floppy? Ken, No. See: Project Goals Maintain as small a footprint as possible for release/branch target installations. Ken, Just to clarify, the LEAF project description and goals haven't had the word floppy in them for years. I'm guessing that would be an honoust mistaken from anyone that remembers the abandoned Linux Router Project. With LEAF having adopted so much from that earlier project it can be hard to tell the difference at first glance. The concept of having read-only media to boot from has, in my opinion, not lost its validity. The thought of being able to reboot and loose anything a hacker has changed, is very assuring. Obviously you'll still need to plug the leak that the hacker discovered, but at least you have no immediate worry about others discovering the hackers backdoor. I realize that none of the commercial products appear to be using this concept, but their solution is to reset to factory defaults. In essence that is no different, but it offers a lot less flexibility towards the people operating it. I do not use LEAF out of cheapness, I use it because I think I can do a better job than those commercial products. Gordon -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/ -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
On Mon, 2009-08-10 at 10:48 -0400, Ken Gentle wrote: While the LEAF project goals may not include the word floppy, and even taking into account the LRP history, there are a lot of posts in the archives discussing the need/perceived requirement to keep the Bering (and Bering uClibc) minimal runnable configuration small enough to fit on a floppy (maybe a non-standard 1.6Mb, but still on a floppy). My question, Is a LEAF distribution required to fit on and boot from a 1.44Mb floppy? was more rhetorical in nature, intended to spur discussion to get the real requirements figured out. -snip- Ken, The project goals were rewritten in a manner that allows for evolution in hardware and software. Setting specific limits prevents leaps in leaf/branch development. -- Mike Noyes mhnoyes at users.sourceforge.net http://sourceforge.net/users/mhnoyes/ SF.net Projects: leaf, sourceforge/sitedocs -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
On Mon, 2009-08-10 at 10:18 +0200, Gordon Bos wrote: -snip- The concept of having read-only media to boot from has, in my opinion, not lost its validity. The thought of being able to reboot and loose anything a hacker has changed, is very assuring. Obviously you'll still need to plug the leak that the hacker discovered, but at least you have no immediate worry about others discovering the hackers backdoor. -snip- Gordon, Hardware write protect is something that concerns our project members. See: http://www.mail-archive.com/search?q=write+protectl=leaf-devel%40lists.sourceforge.net -- Mike Noyes mhnoyes at users.sourceforge.net http://sourceforge.net/users/mhnoyes/ SF.net Projects: leaf, sourceforge/sitedocs -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
Ken Gentle wrote: While the LEAF project goals may not include the word floppy, and even taking into account the LRP history, there are a lot of posts in the archives discussing the need/perceived requirement to keep the Bering (and Bering uClibc) minimal runnable configuration small enough to fit on a floppy (maybe a non-standard 1.6Mb, but still on a floppy). I'd guess few people could even run LEAF from a single floppy at present time. I know I can't, and I've never owned any legacy system that could boot from non (IBM) standard disk sizes. Even in the old LRP days with the 2.2 kernel I was required to use a two-floppy setup at one point. As small as possible seems to me a much more valid target then trying to stay within 1.44Mb. That said, I do feel that efforts should be made to still allow booting from floppy in future developments. When considering power consumption it still makes a lot of sense to use a legacy system and many of those will simply not boot from CD or USB devices (but will allow using once booted). Gordon -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
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
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
On Sun, 2009-08-09 at 11:13 -0400, Ken Gentle wrote: -snip- 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? -snip- Ken, No. See: Project Goals Maintain as small a footprint as possible for release/branch target installations. -- Mike Noyes mhnoyes at users.sourceforge.net http://sourceforge.net/users/mhnoyes/ SF.net Projects: leaf, sourceforge/sitedocs -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
On Sun, 2009-08-09 at 09:13 -0700, Mike Noyes wrote: On Sun, 2009-08-09 at 11:13 -0400, Ken Gentle wrote: -snip- 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? -snip- Ken, No. See: Project Goals Maintain as small a footprint as possible for release/branch target installations. Ken, Just to clarify, the LEAF project description and goals haven't had the word floppy in them for years. -- Mike Noyes mhnoyes at users.sourceforge.net http://sourceforge.net/users/mhnoyes/ SF.net Projects: leaf, sourceforge/sitedocs -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 11:51, Ken Gentle wrote: 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.cawrote: 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. do not misinterpret me, I wrote an early HOWTO about using secure flash disks for leaf :-( and yes, I agree, I live easily with the flash memory world. There are 2 main things that are different from a floppy - size - write protection In my eyes, the write protection is the more important factor. There have been multiple attempts to solve this, amongst it unloading the device driver. There has been a experimental 2.6 release on CVS which was hardly used by anyone, hey, this is an open source project, get your hands dirty. cheers Erich -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/ -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
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.camailto: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.chmailto:erich.t...@think.ch] Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 2:40 PM To: Dillabough, Dave Cc: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.netmailto: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. do not misinterpret me, I wrote an early HOWTO about using secure flash disks for leaf :-( and yes, I agree, I live easily with the flash memory world. There are 2 main things that are different from a floppy - size - write protection In my eyes, the write protection is the more important factor. There have been multiple attempts to solve this, amongst it unloading the device driver. There has been a experimental 2.6 release on CVS which was hardly used by anyone, hey, this is an open source project, get your hands dirty. cheers Erich -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.netmailto:leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
Brent Gardner wrote: Dillabough, Dave 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 have two systems that are so legacy that they won't boot from a CD. But don't let them hold back progress. If a 2.6 kernel means better support for modern NICs and USB devices I'm all for it. That would still work. One of my first LRP setups booted from floppy and then read additional packages from CDROM. All you need is the boot image, kernel, initrd.lrp and leaf.cfg. With the current kernel that adds up to just over 900k. So how big would this 2.6 kernel be? Gordon -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
On 8/3/2009 08:21, Mike Noyes wrote: (from leaf.devel) Everyone, Erich Titl (etitl) promoted to project admin, and Jeff Newmiller (jdnewmil) demoted to project member. Congrats! -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
Erich Titl (etitl) promoted to project admin, and Jeff Newmiller For those of us on the user list only, any comment on a 2.6 branch? :) Congratulations Erich. - Bob -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
Hi Robert K Coffman Jr. -Info From Data Corp. wrote: Erich Titl (etitl) promoted to project admin, and Jeff Newmiller For those of us on the user list only, any comment on a 2.6 branch? :) M 2.6 is a bit fatter than 2.4, it has more recent drivers and most of the development is there. I am not particularly hampered by the bigger footprint of 2.6 but it might go against one of the early goals, the floppy size. Also, I believe, maintaining two branches is quite a task for the core developers team, which is only worth the trouble if the need really exists. Congratulations Erich. Thanks, have not found out what the real difference is. cheers erich -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
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 largely an artificial constraint now. If for some reason the use of a floppy is required then older versions of LEAF are still available. -Original Message- From: Erich Titl [mailto:erich.t...@think.ch] Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 6:41 AM To: Robert K Coffman Jr. -Info From Data Corp. Cc: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin Hi Robert K Coffman Jr. -Info From Data Corp. wrote: Erich Titl (etitl) promoted to project admin, and Jeff Newmiller For those of us on the user list only, any comment on a 2.6 branch? :) M 2.6 is a bit fatter than 2.4, it has more recent drivers and most of the development is there. I am not particularly hampered by the bigger footprint of 2.6 but it might go against one of the early goals, the floppy size. Also, I believe, maintaining two branches is quite a task for the core developers team, which is only worth the trouble if the need really exists. Congratulations Erich. Thanks, have not found out what the real difference is. cheers erich -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
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. do not misinterpret me, I wrote an early HOWTO about using secure flash disks for leaf :-( and yes, I agree, I live easily with the flash memory world. There are 2 main things that are different from a floppy - size - write protection In my eyes, the write protection is the more important factor. There have been multiple attempts to solve this, amongst it unloading the device driver. There has been a experimental 2.6 release on CVS which was hardly used by anyone, hey, this is an open source project, get your hands dirty. cheers Erich -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
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 largely an artificial constraint now. If for some reason the use of a floppy is required then older versions of LEAF are still available. What about the read-only aspect? I currently boot most of my LEAF machines from CD-ROM and read config from USB flash drive. I've seen precious few USB devices with a write-protect switch. Has the state of boot-from-USB technology advanced to the point that it is reliable across a broad range of BIOSes and USB devices? The last time I tried to make a bootable USB device things were still in the state of go download this obscure utility from HP and run it in Windows while standing on one foot and sprinkling the blood of a chicken on your machine. And after that it wouldn't boot successfully in half of my machines. Brent Gardner -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
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. do not misinterpret me, I wrote an early HOWTO about using secure flash disks for leaf :-( and yes, I agree, I live easily with the flash memory world. There are 2 main things that are different from a floppy - size - write protection In my eyes, the write protection is the more important factor. There have been multiple attempts to solve this, amongst it unloading the device driver. There has been a experimental 2.6 release on CVS which was hardly used by anyone, hey, this is an open source project, get your hands dirty. cheers Erich -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
Re: [leaf-user] Project Admin
Dillabough, Dave 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 have two systems that are so legacy that they won't boot from a CD. But don't let them hold back progress. If a 2.6 kernel means better support for modern NICs and USB devices I'm all for it. Brent Gardner -- Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
