Re: Diskless Debian
On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 10:13:08AM +0100, David Goodenough wrote:
> The problem with network booting is that you are then not only reliant on
> the disk on your server, but all of the rest of the server and network
> infrastructure.
True, but the risk can be reduced with a ramdisk and regular backups.
Then the only time the firewall relies on the server is when it boots,
whitch should not be that often. Besides, if the network ifrastructure
is down there isn't much use for a firewall anyway ;)
> Have you considered something like a mini-ITX board with a Compact Flash
> card on it. These come with quire reasonable amounts of space these days
> and you can fit a stripped down Debian install on it with no difficulty.
That sounds like a more professional option indeed. It's just that I
would like to use one of my old PC's for this task. But it's a good
option for the next project.
> Alternatively you can use some of the small comms boards that are around
> these days. There are the WRAP boards from pcengines.ch and the Routerboard
> boards from Microtik. The WRAP boards need CF, but the new RBs (the 500 and
> 110 series) come with 64MB NAND memory. OpenWRT support for the 532 is being
> tested at the moment, and for the 112 is being worked on and given that
> OpenWRT is built to run on machines with between 4 and 8 MB NAND memory the
> 64MB that these boxes have is more then enough for all the packages you
> could want.
I like the OpenWRT project a lot but the advantage with a Debian install
is more updates and more choice in software.
> David
--
Frank Hart
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