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Date: Sun, 04 May 2003 12:00:42 -0700
From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
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To: Matt Douhan <matt@hasta.se>
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Subject: Re: SV: Floppy Support
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Matt Douhan wrote:
> > 2. Servers without CDROM drives.  As another poster mentioned, 1U rack or
> > clustering servers frequently don't have CDROMs.  I know mine don't.
> 
> Fine. PXE boot. What sort of sick f!#ker adds a floppy but leaves a CD
> out, anyway? And if you're missing both, surely it's somewhat less
> painful to walk around with a USB CDROM drive than to walk around with a
> pair of boot floppies?

Most embedded deployments don't have a floppy OR a CDROM OR an
accessible USB port; they have a custom case fab that bolts over
anything not used in the product itself; that's if they even
populate the connectors from the motherboard vendor at all,
instead of saving money on connectors.

To upgrade them, you have to vnconfig a device on the floppy
image, extract the mfsroot, vnconfig *another* device on that,
mount it up, and copy off the sysinstall.

Then you can copy the sysinstall over NFS, NFS mount the CDROM
from a second machine, and then run the sysinstall and tell it
to "install from local drive", but give it the NFS volume,
instead.

-- Terry