NanoBSD :: smallest image size

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

Tim Judd <gmail.com!tajudd at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 23:48 -0800, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
> > > I did consider running it off a straight cd, but I alter my routes
> > > enough through various tunnels I have established that this would
> > > be a pain.  (i.e. updating vtund configs) ...
> > 
> > System on CD, reading config from floppy?
>
> I've tried this, in my own mix
> due to rcorder, an external /etc filesystem is not read NOR mounted in
> time to be read.  When I did it and tried to bring it up ASAP, the
> system failed to read hostname variable in the external /etc filesystem.
>
> I haven't yet, and probably won't try -- to rewrite the /etc/rc startup
> to allow it.  And I think it's because /etc/rc sources /etc/rc.conf even
> before it runs....  So how can I start rc and get the
> external /etc/rc.conf read before rc starts?
>
> I'd like to know, if it's possible.

There's no way to mount /etc AFAIK, because parts of it are
needed too soon:  /etc/fstab if nothing else.  However, I had
gotten the impression that the only frequently-changing part
of the config in question involved vtund.

Rather than trying to do the mount early, I was thinking
of starting vtund later than usual -- perhaps by making
it depend on the completion of "mount -a" -- and having
it read its config from a file on the mounted floppy.

If vtund has to start sooner than that, an alternate approach
might be to have vtund read its config from the /dev/fd0 device
itself, rather than from a filesystem mounted on /dev/fd0
(having prepared the floppy ahead of time by something like
"dd if=/path/to/vtund/config/file of=/dev/fd0").

Yet another approach would be to have boot and root (and thus
/etc) on floppy, but /usr on CD.  Tweaking things so that /usr
can be read-only dates back at least as far as SunOS 4.0.