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Date:      Thu, 29 Feb 96 9:49:59 CST
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@solaria.sol.net>
To:        dufault@hda.com (Peter Dufault)
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Cool!  An all new ROUTER FLOPPY
Message-ID:  <199602291550.JAA15162@solaria.sol.net>
In-Reply-To: <199602291005.FAA11294@hda.com> from "Peter Dufault" at Feb 29, 96 05:05:34 am

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> > ftp://ftp.freebsd.sol.net/pub/router.flp
> > 
> > There are several notable problems with it  :-)  But it's still very cool
> > that you can squeeze the essence of UNIX into just a few hundred gzip'ped
> > kilobytes.
> > 
> > If there is any interest I may consider tidying up my build process and
> > putting the whole thing up for ftp.
> 
> Now make it work read-only off the boot floppy and write to a second
> floppy and we have (pretty much) ROM boot FLASH persistent storage.

That would be relatively easy; have /etc/rc mount the second disk on /floppy
and make most of /etc be links to /floppy/fileXYZ.

My "intended" purpose was to provide specifically preconfigured floppies.
However I can't really do anything "useful" with this as it sits because it
requires too much memory. To make my life easy I just took everything I
thought I would need - which includes

init sh stty getty login uname hostname -sh
ls cat chmod chown rm mv cp echo pwd kill reboot test sed date halt
ps vmstat pppstats slstat dev_mkdb
ping traceroute inetd telnetd
cron
ipfw startslip arp pppd ppp routed sliplogin rwhod sysctl
tcpdump mrouted ifconfig route slattach

I was of course sleeping when I included ps and vmstat... no /kernel. Duh.
I haven't tried many of the others yet (I was tired!)

The problem is that I used crunch to ram these all together into a single
executable.  That has the virtue of being very space efficient (about 65% of
a 1000K MFS) but the disadvantage of a very large memory profile.  I am
thinking about looking into making everything separate and installing
minimalist shared libraries..  it COULD be possible..

It would be really cool if we really COULD boot from some type of flash.

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/342-4847



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