Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 14:16:32 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: fyeung@netific.com (francis yeung) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: webbox with bsdi Message-ID: <199608121916.OAA08871@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <199608121142.LAA29783@fyeung5.netific.com> from "francis yeung" at Aug 12, 96 11:42:38 am
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> Greetings, > The WebBox is a standalone BSDI system designed for > personal web browsiing on TV. It contains no > hard disk and has a CD drive. So it has a hard disk, just of a different type :-) > Is there a way that I can generate a standalone FreeBSD > without hard disk ? What should I do with the swap space > area ? Is there a virtual disk system (memory based) in FreeBSD ? > If there is a one, can I assign the swap space to a file which > resides in the virtual file system ? No. You wouldn't want to stick swap in a MFS anyways... it would be silly to swap from RAM to RAM when you could have just left it in RAM to begin with. What you _can_ do: design a MFS that fits within the kernel (the way the boot.flp is built) and stick tcpdump in it. Stick it on a floppy. (I make this sound much easier than it is; I once built a router floppy using this technique and jammed _lots_ of utilities on it; it took all night to get it halfway right). Make sure you have the RAM to support the application. > I have no intention to build a web box. But I want to create > a floppy disk with a very small kernel which will run tcpdump > so that I can use it as standalone traffic monitor to be used > by the school for monitoring student's network traffic. > It has to be standalone system and should NOT be downloaded from > the network. Basically, the system gets booted up from the floppy > disk and starts traffic monitoring. Unless you have a compelling reason to make this work off of floppy (i.e. you don't have a dedicated machine which implies that you might be a student who is illicitly spying on others without the consent of the school)... I advise that you just pop for the hard disk and be done with it. Much less effort. On the other hand... Web boxes.. interesting concept. ... JG
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