North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother))

  • From: Michael Dillon
  • Date: Sat Oct 19 14:52:38 1996

On Sat, 19 Oct 1996, Rob Liebschutz wrote:

> > > You don't need a hard drive.  Use some of the money you saved by not
> > > buying C***o to buy lots of DRAM.  Boot from floppy.

> > I've been thinking about this. A while ago I saw a product that emulated
> > dual 1.4MB floppies in flash on an ISA card. This seemed like a good way
> > to start. Has anyone actually tried this? What flash product did you use?

> I've been thinking about doing this for a while now.  The only product
> that I've found so far is made by a company called MCSI ((619)
> 598-2177) , but the only thing I've been able to get out of them so
> far is that the darn thing emulates a DOS filesystem through the bios,
> though they referred me to another company that does the firmware for
> their card, and claimed that this company could do custom firmware for
> me.  I think MCSI has a card that emulates a dual floppy as well.
> 
> I'd love a card that just provided a single raw drive emulations, even
> IDE would be fine, so I could just copy a whole bootable file sytem
> image into it, but I guess 2 floppy images would suffice.
> 
> The card that emulated an 8mb DOS filesystem was only around $300.

Linux has support for all PCMCIA SRAM cards. The improvements made between
the 1.2 and 2.0 versions of the kernel should allow it to handle packet
forwarding for large numbers of routes now.

FreeBSD may have similar PCMCIA support but I haven't come across any
information on that yet.

You can also try building a machine with a boot device like the 2.88
megabyte floppies. Using the same techniques FreeBSD uses for their boot
disks, you can decompress the boot floppy into a large RAMDISK and run
that way. Or simply use a ZIP drive for the boot device but run from RAM
as before. It's not as good as 100% solid state but it comes pretty close.

There is also at least one company that makes Linux Boot ROM's so this is
also a possibility to explore.

Michael Dillon                   -               ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: [email protected]

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -