FC4 CF-based Router

[Steven Ringwald]

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