Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1998 23:41:28 +1000 From: "Andrew Hannam" <hannama@fan.net.au> To: "Andrzej Bialecki" <abial@nask.pl> Cc: <owner-freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG>, "FreeBSDSmall" <freebsd-small@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Command-line i/f (Re: PicoBSD) Message-ID: <000401bdf065$da48a900$0104010a@andrewh.famzon.com.au> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.02A.9810051410490.4561-100000@korin.warman.org.pl>
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> I personally am a big hater of WWW config interfaces... but that's just > me. IMHO it's useful mostly for marketing hype and (maybe) for people who > are complete newbies, but for those who want to get the job done it just > stands in the way... OTOH, perhaps I had just a bad experience - that one > I tried to use was completely useless, because I could do the same job > much quicker using command-line i/f with completion... I agree they can be bad, and I share your love of the command line. However, a well designed set of pages can do the job and be much easier to use for newbie's or those without the time to study manuals. This probably includes most people and applications for this type of device other than (as they are sometimes called in my country) "propeller-heads" such as me (and you). > > a) Have a serial (or something else) connection just to set the > initial IP > > address. > Ugh... If you go to such measures as connecting it via serial console, > what prevents you from using a PPP connection on it, and do all the job > using serial console? Again I agree. I never said it was a nice solution - just possible. I personally prefer the second method. > > b) Use the scheme that many standalone devices such as print > servers use. > > Until an IP address is programmed via the web front end - all > non-broadcast > > addresses sent to the ethernet card are accepted. Using a > static ARP entry > > for the device with any suitable IP address is then sufficient > to talk to it > > in this initial state. > > Hmmm... This would probably require putting the interface in promiscuous > mode, and using some kind of BPF thing to read the packets... Sounds complicated under PicoBSD - it would be nice if it worked however. You then have a way to bootstrap configurations without a console. I come from the dedicated micro world where such things are designed into the TCP stacks (or rather layers of "full implementation" are turned off to get this effect). Whether you use a TCP bootstrap method to run a WWW server or not - bootstraping the machine using method (b) allows you to get away without any console (either vga or serial based). Again you have the chance to "embed" a little more of the system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-small" in the body of the message
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