[afnog] BandWidth Manager

[Brian Candler]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 03:47:30PM +0000, Mamoudou Keita wrote:
> > Remember you can boot a modern ordinary PC from a USB pen drive;
> 
> 
> Can you tell more about ?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Mamoudou.

Well, a USB pen is just a block storage device, and a modern PC BIOS will be
able to boot from it (just like booting from a USB-attached CD drive). So
you can actually install FreeBSD or whatever onto the pen, and then boot
from it later. If you don't want to go to the trouble of trimming down the
installation then you'll want at least a 512MB pen, but they're pretty cheap
these days (as an example, GBP20 for 512MB on www.dabs.com)

At bootup you'll probably want to mount /tmp and maybe /var from a ramdisk,
since writing to the pen drive is slow. In FreeBSD 5 there are scripts
/etc/rc.d/tmp and /etc/rc.d/var which do this for you; they are intended for
diskless workstations, i.e. those which boot from an NFS root filesystem,
but they should work nicely here too. Look in /etc/defaults/rc.conf for
settings around tmpmfs and varmfs, and copy the ones of interest to
/etc/rc.conf

If you're happy to trim the distribution, then you can get it into a much
smaller space. There's a distribution called 'nanobsd' in the FreeBSD tree,
although I've not played with it.

Also, I wrote a utility called 'tarsplit' which can split a FreeBSD binary
distribution into smaller chunks, so that for example you can have a system
without compilers and text processing tools. See
http://psg.com/~brian/software/tarsplit/

You can even get some Linux and FreeBSD distros which fit in 1.4MB, to run
directly from a floppy disk... they're OK for routers but don't expect a
fully-functional workstation :-)

Regards,

Brian.