On 05/12/12 14:16, Tyler Morgan wrote: > On 5/11/2012 8:48 PM, Nick Holland wrote: >> I suspect the interest in [an OpenBSD Live CD] >> is rapidly approaching zero. Its a concept who's time has come...and >> gone, I think. Five or six years ago, yeah...cool. Today...why?. A >> live CD gives you a very rigid, predefined read-only environment. I >> think a much more useful tool these days is a USB flash drive -- they >> are smaller than a CD, more rugged, and probably run on more modern >> systems than CDs do (I say that with some uncertainty -- some modern >> computers come with no DVD, virtually all come with USB ports, but some >> have broken BIOSs). > > While I generally agree a USB-based installation of whatever OS you > prefer is a great solution to many tasks, I don't feel this description > of a modern live CD environment is completely accurate. > > Before I went home on Friday, one of our not-production, local office > machines needed some more room in its root filesystem so I booted into > an Ubuntu live CD (11.04, I believe), manually brought up eth0, created > and setup resolv.conf, apt-get installed lvm2 via network, and used the > necessary tools to extend an LVM-based ext3 filesystem. Why did I do it > that way? Because I had done it that way before without any problems, > the CD was on the bench, the drive was available, it took about 20 > minutes start to finish, and it effectively accomplished the task.
With OpenBSD, you do that kinda stuff by either bringing up the system in single user mode or with bsd.rd, booted from either the standard file system or standard boot cd. You don't need/want a "live cd". And it won't take you 20 minutes, unless you need to fsck a really big file system, which is something you generally shouldn't need to do from single user mode or bsd.rd. Of course, you could do it with a USB flash drive, too, but that's all the hard way. As is using a Live CD under Unix, problem is, they don't provide you an "easy" way...so everyone is stuck singing the praises of an overly complex solution that hauled your butt out of the fire... hm...Stockholm Syndrome in the IT departments -- singing the praises of clumsy tools that shouldn't need to exist to get you out of situations you shouldn't have had to been in in the first place! > At no point did I have to jump through any hoops like remounting > something read/write. It was simply a usable Linux environment. I'm sure > it had limitations that I do not know about and did not run into, but, > respectfully (and rhetorically), what about that is "pre-defined" and > "rigid"? It's a CD_ROM_. Read Only Memory. That is, pretty much by definition, "pre-defined" and "rigid". ok, the person who put your Ubuntu live CD together gave you the tools you needed, and you downloaded some more to something other than the CD (either local file system or memory file system). But compared to a USB flash disk...you can load the tools on the flash, leaving your local file systems untouched, and without the memory cost of a memory file system. And yes, you can cram a lot of useful tools in a 700k CD, but not ALL useful tools. You can cram a lot more into a DVD, but not all computers have DVD drives on them (ok, that's a weak argument, as most machines that don't have DVD drives won't boot from a USB stick either). And, you still have a very finite space... However, 8GB flash drives are getting pretty cheap, you can put whatever _you_ want on one. No matter how you look at it, a boot flash drive will be more flexible, as you can make it as you want it, and adjust it afterwards. > To digress a little further, one day I was talking to our small-ish, > local hardware vendor and he said he should charge to remove DVD drives > from rack-mounted servers because he gets them back to have the drives > put back in so often, and I wasn't sure if he was kidding or not. USB is > great but, like you say, some BIOSes are broken and the death of the > CD/DVD isn't upon us quite yet. I mean, look at OpenBSD's seemingly > adamant support for floppy-based systems. I'm not sure how that connects to the topic at hand. We aren't talking about removing CD/DVD drives from servers or dropping support of OpenBSD CD (or floppy) install processes...we are talking about creating special "Live CDs" (which are not currently generated or supported by the project, and I have heard ZERO interest in creating such a thing as part of the project) vs. full, normal installs of OpenBSD on flash disks (which are completely normal, and thus fully supported). btw: as USB ports are not as impacted by dust and age as CDs and DVDs are, in five or so years, today's server might be more likely to boot from a USB flash drive than the dust-encaked DVD drive. A better argument would be that sparc or alpha, or all our other platforms that can't boot from USB would be better served by a "live CD" than from USB flash drives. However, I've not heard too many requests for hppa Live CDs, there seems to be an unspoken bias for amd64/i386 for these things. :) Nick.
