FreeBSD router on a USB flash drive?

[Roman Volf]

The fewer moving parts in a router, the better. Flash drives have no
moving parts and should have a lower probability of failure. Something
you should look into, Christoffer, are pcmcia-to-ide and also CF-to-IDE
adapters. You can get a cheaper Compact Flash card, plug it in, and the
computer thinks that its a normal IDE HD. They cost about $40 for the
adapters plus the price of the flash card.

Roman Volf



Justin Hopper wrote:

>On Mon, 2004-01-19 at 08:55, Christoffer Pio wrote:
>  
>
>>Hello all, has anyone experience with booting from, and running a FreeBSD
>>based router on a USB 2.0 flash drive?
>>    
>>
>
>I'm really curious what brought you to the situation of needing to boot
>from a flash drive for a router? =)
>
>I picked up a USB 2.0 flash drive (128MB) for transferring files around
>between workstations and I really like its convenience.  I formatted the
>drive in FreeBSD 5.1 and installed the standard boot loader.  It took me
>a while to find a box with a new enough BIOS to be able to use the flash
>drive as a boot option, but I finally found one and was able to get to
>the boot loader.  However, 128MB didn't seem to be enough space to do a
>minimum install so I was not able to install 5.1 on it and boot from
>it.  I didn't have the time to try to see if I could trim down the
>install further, so this was as far as I got.
>
>I assume with a larger flash drive it is completely possible.  As to why
>you would want to do it, I'm still not sure =)
>
>  
>

-- 
Roman Volf
Keystreams Internet Solutions
(619) 572-2062