Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 19:33:36 -0500 From: Nathan Mace <nmace@myrealbox.com> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Does this exist? Message-ID: <119245048150.20021105193336@myrealbox.com>
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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 i know that there are several Linux distro's that provide "live" cd's, but is there anything out there that provides the functionality I've described, be it FreeBSD or not? *NOTE: 512 megs was just an example. i have no idea how much ram would be needed. also, can you please CC any replies to me. I'm not a member of the mailing list -- Nathan mailto:nmace@myrealbox.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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