Re: Accessing machines behind a firewall
Actually, yes. The floppy is only used during bootup, and from then on it
runs totally out of ramdisk. A hard drive is spinning almost all the
time, and will fail eventually.
The solid state flashdisks are really nice, but a tad pricey. Most of us
have old 486's laying in a corner gathering dust, and they can be put to
almost no-cost use this way. They don't even need a new/bigger hard
drive, in fact any drive they have can be removed.
For really good fault-tolerance, using a passive pci backplane with a few
single-board computers with flash disk is a cool way to go. It's really
only a couple of relatively simple scripts to have backup boards watching
the live one, and when they see it fail, take over.
All that is is a ifconfig down and ifconfig back up with the downed
systems ip address. The boot script looks for the first available ip
address from a list, and ifconfigs with it. If it's the main firewall
address, then it assumes it's the new firewall and starts services. If
not, then it goes into watch mode, waiting for the current firewall to
die.
On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Nick Busigin wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Dean Carpenter wrote:
>
> > Hmmm. You should still be able to do all that with the Linux Router
> > Project disk, eliminating the hard disk. Just point the logging via
> > syslog to another internal machine.
> >
> > I've had too many drives fail on me to really want to trust them to a
> > "turn it on and leave for a year" type machine. The floppy solution works
> > very very well - I have it in use in a couple of places with a perfect
> > record so far.
>
> Do you really trust the floppy solution more than a sealed hard drive?
> Even a better solution would be to use a solid state FLASH disk if you
> want superior fault tolerance.
--
Dean Carpenter deano@areyes.com 94TT :)
Areyes, Inc. Dean.Carpenter@pharma.com
"No matter where you go, there you are" sayeth Buckaroo across the Eighth Dimension
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