On Fri, Jun 08, 2001 at 10:10:13PM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> In message <61411576E951D211AF330008C7245DD90818E00E@ntmsg0005.corpmail.telstra
> .com.au>, "Jenkins, Graham K [IBM GSA]" writes:
> >I have seen NetBSD 4.2 on I386 come up with a corrupted root filesystem
> >after a power bounce on a couple of occassions. If we could use 
> >journaling on the root filesystem (like a couple of other OS's!), that
> >might alleviate the problem.
> >
> >And of course, the Penguin people have a router-on-a-floppy that looks
> >OK. But I'd rather do it with NetBSD.
> 
> 
> THe way I'd do it is wtih a ramdisk, just like the install 
> floppies or CDs.  Boot from that medium, uncompress to ramdisk, and run 
> that way.  The physical disk could then be read-only.

CompactFlash cards are particularly useful for this -- they look like IDE
disks to the machine, if cabled up correctly.

I have some tools for building hardened, stripped-down NetBSD systems on
CF disks (some slight changes are required to run NetBSD with a read-only
root, primarily mounting /var as a ram disk and extracting its structure
from a tar file) but I'm not 100% sure I own them.  I'll have to talk to
the client they were originally written for (who didn't ever pay for this
specific part of the work) and see if I can figure something out.

Thor