Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Julian Elischer]

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Scott Long wrote:

> Julian Elischer wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Here at Vicor, we have over a thousand machines spread over about 
> > 20 sites. About 10 of those machines have cdrom drives. Our plans call
> > for moving from 4.x to 5.x, probably at the end of 2004, maybe early
> > 2005. Most of the machien swill not have been replaced by then so 
> > we'll still have very few cdroms. 
> > Luckily this would probably not be an issue for the upgrade, but
> > the Custommer Engineers (CEs) need to be able to rebuild machine quickly
> > in the case of disk failures or other problems. They use floppies at the
> > moment for this.
> > 
> > I could immagine that a floppy that did a net-boot might 
> > be a possibility, but retraining them to do things differently is
> > always a problem.
> > 
> > 
> 
> Can these machines netboot/PXEboot?  In any case, there looks to be some
> prospects for someone stepping forward to help with floppies.  If Vicor
> wants to help out too, that would be wonderful.

I have grave doubts as to all 1000  machines being able to net/PXE 
boot.. They have come from varying sources at different times..

Of course we may be able to produce our own boot floppies with unneeded
options removed.. A net-booting floppy may be enough, and I'll add it to
my list of things that I'll keep my eye on.. If we get close and no-one
has worked on it I'll see what I need to do to get it to work for us :-)

(At that point I'd get payed to do whatever it took  :-)


> 
> Scott
> 
>