OS and Hardware

[Kevin D. Kinsey, DaleCo, S.P.]

{Good practice: wrap your lines around 72 characters ... not everyone
is running X or 256 column terminals ...}

Doug Chartier wrote:

> There is a Linux version on CD that runs from CD using the CD as
> the OS drive instead of "C:" or other hard drive.  This seems like the
> answer to a multitude of questions and well as presenting a few of
> its own.
>

IIRC, there is now a thing called "FreeBSIE" which is similar; a CD live
filesystem OS on a bootable CD that's basically a "FreeBSD Demo."
Never tried it myself.

> This basically stops outside access to the OS from hackers, viruses,
> spyware etc.  Would it make sense to develop a FBSD OS - or any OS
> for that matter - on something like a flash card that cannot be altered
> from within the system directly?  The CD approach does the same thing,
> but would slow the system down if the CD had to be accessed often.  If
> the OS was copied from the CD to RAM, that would solve the speed
> problem and maintain the base OS security.
>
> This might be an old concept, but it's new to me.


I think FBSD has had "Picobsd" for years, which operates very similar
to what you describe.  Make a CD or even floppy, set it r/o, boot your
firewall boxen from it ... 

$man picobsd

Kevin Kinsey