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Re: ghost for linux?



On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 02:59:25PM -0500, MaD dUCK wrote:

reading your reaction gives me the eery feeling I've missed what
this thread was about.  To me that's the single most horrible thing
that comes from mailing-lists instead of plain good old netnews,
you loose context easily.  I know I should delve into mutt's
capacity to filter messages for me, but I've never found how I can
have mutt toggle display af read messages, which is easy in any
decent newsreader.

> also sprach Carel Fellinger (on Fri, 02 Mar 2001 08:30:56PM +0100):
> > /var:  copy it to /tmp first? 
> >        or add rescue.bin and boot.catalog to /var?
> 
> thing is: the boot process needs scratch space. log files, utmp/wtmp,
> pid files and all that jazz. these reside in /var, and a bootable
> cdrom must initialize a ramdisk which it mounts as /var. this is not
> always an easy process.

Ah, that's why I used the debian rescue discs, that one does all of this:)
But that's not what you're after. You want to mount the cdrom as /.
Well, have a look at Gibraltar or at bblcd.

> > /?:    sorry but you lost me here.
> 
> the root partition. where will the root partition be? init won't
> accept /dev/cdrom because that's a drive, not a partition.

I doubt this is the real problem, e.g. Gibraltar ( a Debian based firewall
running from a cdrom ) works.

> > from boot to prompt?: I must be stupid, but I/ve no idea what you're at.
> 
> what happens between loading the boot image off the cdrom until you
> logged in with the cdrom? where is stuff read from and where is it
> written to?

Still not sure I read you right, but...
Booting from CD is often accomplished by having a complete image-file
of a bootable floppy of up to 2.44Meg at a special place on the CD.
The BIOS then treats that special file as if it were floppy drive A.

So we are back to booting from flop, with no writable harddisk.
Let's use ramdisks then:), fill here up with a minimal filesystem
and when all is fine change the root device.

-- 
groetjes, carel



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