Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Martin Nilsson]

This is getting stupid!

This discussion is just like when the i386 support was removed from the 
GENERIC kernel, a lot of noise about old systems that wouldn't be able 
to run (or benefit) from FreeBSD 5 anyway.

>>And, further, some of us don't have (and don't want) CD burners, and even
>>if we had 'em, don't want to burn (no pun intended ;) a CD blank just to
>>install an OS, when we can just (re-)use 2 floppies and do it across the
>>LAN from a local FTP mirror, which is as fast as a CD drive anyway.

I fail to see the difference in required labour between creating two 
floppies or a CD-R/RW disc. Most new machines ship with CD-RW drives 
today, the only boxes that can't boot from a CD are early Pentium1 class 
and frankly why run 5.x or 6.x on those?


> Here at Vicor, we have over a thousand machines spread over about 
> 20 sites. About 10 of those machines have cdrom drives. Our plans call
> for moving from 4.x to 5.x, probably at the end of 2004, maybe early
> 2005. Most of the machien swill not have been replaced by then so 
> we'll still have very few cdroms. 

That is why I want to get boot from an USB CDROM to work, this way you 
just plug in the portable drive in the machine that you want to boot 
just like you do with a floppy, the difference is that you don't have to 
wait to change floppies. You can also save some money by not having to 
buy CD/floppy drives for your servers. Slim drives (for server use) are 
not cheap. Besides floppydrives tend to collect dust and never work 
anyway when you want to use them.

> Luckily this would probably not be an issue for the upgrade, but
> the Custommer Engineers (CEs) need to be able to rebuild machine quickly
> in the case of disk failures or other problems. They use floppies at the
> moment for this.

PXE boot against an automated backup/restore service would be much more 
useful for this.

	/Martin