loading SunOS from a different medium ?

[Eric Ho]

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 at confidence.princeton.edu
					eho at bogey.princeton.edu
regards.

-eric-