eho@cognito.princeton.edu (Eric Ho) (08/20/89)
Just thought that wouldn't it be nice if the new Sun servers would come with erasable optical floppy drives. This way, the whole SunOS is there -- all you need to install the network is to plug the floppy into hte drive and then boot the system up and then invoke whatever install proecdure to setup things like hostname, ip addresses, client names, & partition the various magnetic drives, ..etc.. Then, when the whole install procedure is done, all one needs to do is to do a direct copy of what is on the floppy onto the system disk (e.g. sd0, xy0, ..etc..) and then eject the floppy and reboot the system (after changing the boot device in the eeprom of course). This way, you get the same high throughput from the magnetic hard drives since the setup will be exactly the same as before (i.e.everything including all systems stuff are on the magnetic disks) and yet you can use the optical floppy drive for backup or storing on-line archive stuff and when you've a disk crash or something (or you mess up a lot of important system files), you just need to retrieve the system floppy and do a direct floppy to system disk copy and you're ready to go again. Oh well, just a thought. -- Eric Ho Cognitive Science Lab., Princeton University voice = 609-987-2819 (x2987) email = eho@confidence.princeton.edu eho@bogey.princeton.edu regards. -eric-