--On 08 July 2005 13:04 -0400, Vivek Ayer wrote:
I have a very crappy computer that's been stripped of its HD and CDROM drives. All that's left is a 1G of a RAM and floppy drive.
If your 'very crappy' computers have 1G of RAM, I'd like some of your good ones ;-)
I already have a firewall setup on another box, but was thinking of building an authentication server on a floppy-based solution.
"authentication server" doesn't convey much information as to what you're expecting to run really...
Running from floppy drive will mean a lot of extra trouble building custom small ramdisk kernels and whatever software you need, getting them onto disk, and getting them to work. (If you really *really* want to go down this route, look at how the ramdisk install floppies are built in 'make release', look at what's cut out by SMALL_KERNEL, look at flashboot, flashdist, minibsd).
You could save a lot of trouble either by net-booting (if you have suitable hardware - you don't mention the arch), or buying a CF-IDE adapter and a reasonably-sized CF card. With either of these you can fairly easily use either standard OpenBSD binaries (in which case you'll have much less work to do yourself to get it running), or something like flashboot for 'run-from-ramdisk', or some other cut-down system (e.g. flashdist which has a different set of trade-offs to flashboot).
