The future of Diskette bootstraps

[Japheth Cleaver]

At 02:59 PM 5/17/2004, Pedro wrote:
>Guy Fraser wrote:
>
>>I would presume that boot floppies should be around for a little while 
>>longer but floppies are too small to be used much longer.
>>
>>I have been noticing more and more computers being sold that don't come 
>>with floppy drives anymore. I'm not just talking about Mac's either. We 
>>have a bunch of little machines we use for single purpose servers, and 
>>they don't come with a floppy or CD, so we hookup a CD to get the install 
>>started and do a network install.
>>
>>Good luck.
>
>Two possibilities:
>1 - some machines have support to network boot. Maybe try this?
>2 - I dont know if Fedora Core 2 will have it , but during test , a 
>pendrive image was released , so you could boot from USB..
>
>--
>Pedro Macedo



I too lamented the loss of floppy kickstart boots in FC2. We have a large 
number of small Micro-ATX boxes purchased sans floppy or CD drives. The 
original plan was to cart a USB floppy around when needed, since USB CD-ROM 
drives are bulkier than we'd like. Also, we have 2 NICs in each one and 
were having problems kickstarting over HTTP, so we needed local writable 
storage.

However, after using the USB "pen drive" image in FC2T3, I'm fine leaving 
floppies in the dust. A USB dongle is fast(er than a floppy), simple, has 
no external power supply, cheap, and allows plenty of storage for local 
kickstart images, ssh keys, or anything else in a kickstart script you 
don't want to pull from the network.

Fry's sells 16 MB Lexar USB JumpDrives for about $10. We've got one dongle 
for each type of kickstart script we run, each a different iMac-inspired 
color so we can tell them apart.

Our Biostar M7VIZ boards see the pen drive as a USB-ZIP for boot purposes, 
but that's a small price to pay.


Hope this helps,


Japheth Cleaver
cleaver at ixpres.net