Booting Linux from an internal IDE Zip disk?

[Matt Kirk]

It is a great idea, however, I think it would be too expensive a solution.
Richard,  from what I remember about the computers in the lab, the bios was
old and wouldn't support booting onto an ide zip drive.  This was why scsi
was purchased in the first place.  New bios' should allow you to boot to IDE
(I think mine does and I will test it when I get home.)  Are you replacing
the lab computers with new ones?  If you could get an educational discount
for the VMWare it may be worth it for you as it will save you and your staff
lots of time in management.

A third option might be to have a floopy for boot, a zip for a RW file
system and a CDRom for your static filesystem.  You could then just burn a
new CD every time you needed to make changes to the static filesystem (where
before your had to update every computer).  Students will still beable to
mount the local linux filesystem as root though.

--

Matt Kirk - mkirk at sonic.net
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-----Original Message-----
From: Brad Cox [mailto:brad at linuxbofh.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 3:58 PM
To: talk at nblug.org
Subject: Re: Booting Linux from an internal IDE Zip disk?

On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 02:06:14PM -0800, Richard Gordon wrote:
> In the computer labs at SSU there is a need to allow students to be
> root under Linux and to have a copy of Linux that they can configure
> and run on any computer in the lab. For this we want them to have
> Linux on a Zip disk.

You may as well give them root on the box in question, as once they
boot their own copy, gaining root on the real box is trivial.  You
should consider using VMWare (an x86 emulator, www.vmware.com).  It
will let them run Linux (or other x86 OS's) from within Linux, but on
the real system they remain themselves, so no security issues.

VMWare can present files on the disk to the OS it is running as if
they were hard drives, so their root partition could be on the zip
disk and /usr could be off the network (you should not let them
access the real one).  It has a feature that would enable them to work
with a disk, but without making any changes to the actual filesystem.
They can explore, break things, etc.  When they shut down vmware,
everything is back where it should be.

--
Brad Cox                brad at linuxbofh.com
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"Nuclear war can ruin your whole compile."
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