What is the modern "Floppy-Based" router based on?

[Jason Clinton]

On Sat, 2006-03-04 at 20:42 -0800, Leo Mauler wrote:
> The main problem with the CF card solution is that the
> CF card has no "write-protect" feature.  The original
> reason this topic was brought up in the first place
> was that floppy-based routers have easily switched
> write-protect tabs, allowing one to easily edit the
> floppy if necessary, then switch it back to
> write-protect mode for normal operation.

The hardware write protection is mostly irrelevant. For instance, in
Debian, you can create a change-rooted installation of Debian using the
cdebootstrap command. You can then download the casper utilities from
Ubuntu and install them in to the change rooted environment. Once you
have all the configuration that you want, you simply invoke casper and
move the resulting kernel, initramfs and squashfs+unionfs files on to
your CF/USB device and install grub to the MBR of the device.
Presto-chango: a 'live' file system which can run from pretty much
anything with no possibility of being modified while running.

Not that this is limited to Debian by any means: AFAIK, you can do the
same kind of thing using Damn Small Linux. Even projects like Gentoo
have a similar mechanism.

-- 
Jason Clinton <me at jasonclinton.com>
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