FC4 CF-based Router
Steven Ringwald
asric at asric.com
Fri Dec 23 05:34:33 UTC 2005
Bob Chiodini wrote:
>> Ok. So you are saying, basically, to use a ext2 filesystem natively
>> to boot off of and then just treat it like grub/Fedora normally treat
>> partitions? Or are you saying boot the flash, and then hop over to
>> the hard-drive? Problem with the latter; system has no hard-drive,
>> and adding one would increase its weight/cost/number of moving
>> parts... Design criteria is *very* strict on these points, and the
>> specification of "no hard-drive". :-)
>> If the former, the problem with that is we wanted to make it easy to
>> upgrade the flash image, rather than having to include bios upgrade
>> utility. Almost any system on the market right now can read/write
>> vfat (Mac/Linux/Windows/BeOS)...
>
> I mean boot and run from the CF. It looks like a hard drive to Linux
> anyway. I take it that you got a USB stick loaded with Linux to boot
> and run. Is that image too large for the CF?
Yes. I can boot and run in rw mode, but am having difficulty with the
image. Yes, the image is rather large (something like 200mb). I have
larger CF's, but when I can get a 256mb stick for $18, the price point
of USB makes it very tempting...
>> Well, I guess I could do that. We thought that by making the grub
>> partition ext2, and the other partition vfat, we would minimize the
>> danger of accidentally overwriting the bootloader when a tech is
>> popping the key into a windows box.
>
> You probably can't avoid accidently overwriting the bootloader. As I
> did on the system here, a minimal, initrd-only, bootable partition had
> the tools necessary to upgrade the primary system. My intent was to
> use a USB stick. I don't think the partition type on the stick would
> matter. Vfat should work as long as your initrd kernel supports it.
> My PC/104 board could not boot from the stick. If something went
> horribly wrong we could always replace the CF with a good one. If
> you're working on some kind of avionics or similar then that luxury
> might not exist.
Yeah. I agree that making the thing *completely* idiot-proof is
impossible. Just trying to make it much more difficult for someone to
mess it up.
BTW: I have gotten something very close to what I want to boot; I nuked
the fat partition, and have the ISO9660 image dd'ed into it, and I have
gotten the thing to boot (albeit not happily since I haven't done the
rc.readonly stuff on it yet) but it is closer.
Steve
More information about the users
mailing list