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Date:      Wed, 6 Nov 2002 07:54:03 -0600
From:      Kyle Martin <mkm@ieee.org>
To:        Nathan Mace <nmace@myrealbox.com>
Cc:        chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Does this exist?
Message-ID:  <20021106135403.GA82947@marvin.bsdng.org>
In-Reply-To: <119245048150.20021105193336@myrealbox.com>
References:  <119245048150.20021105193336@myrealbox.com>

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On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 07:33:36PM -0500, Nathan Mace wrote:
> Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 19:33:36 -0500
> From: Nathan Mace <nmace@myrealbox.com>
> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
> Subject: Does this exist?
> 
> first of all, I'm not sure this is the proper place to be asking this,
> however as far as i know this mailing list isn't restricted to a
> particular subject except FreeBSD in general.
> 
> that said, my question is this:
> 
> Are there any open source projects out there that are working on
> making a slim OS that will boot off of a CD, load itself into memory
> and run from completely within RAM, and never touch a hard
> drive.......now i know there are...there are several "live" Linux CD's which
> do this but let me finish my question.........are there any that can
> do this, and are aimed at firewall's?
> 
> as cheap as RAM for PC's is now, why couldn't a company afford to buy
> say 512* megs of ram and have a firewall that runs totally in ram and
> boots from a CD-R?  think about that for a second.  if system got
> comprised, what could the "bad guy" do?  he couldn't install anything that
> would last because as soon as the sys-admin discovered he was there,
> they could re-boot the machine, and since it boots off of a read-only
> "hard drive" you know that it hasn't been comprised, and the ram that
> it uses for a temporary hard drive would be instantly formatted.  granted if
> someone got in once they can do it again as soon as the machine was up
> and running again......but how is that any different than a machine
> that runs off of a hard drive?  you would still have to wait on an
> update or patch.  and if you had this in a production environment you
> could have a dedicated machine running FreeBSD and when the patch came
> out you could install the patch to that box, and then burn a new image
> that was created from that OS and boom.  your firewall is not upgraded
> 

picobsd(8)

-- 
Kyle Martin
mkm@ieee.org

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