Re: FC4 CF-based Router

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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




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