[Soekris] What about this feature request?

[David Courtney]

> I guess you haven't used xmodem very much...
>
> You could try something like m0n0wall as an experiment,
> (don't forget to gunzip the .img first though :-)
> just transfer it via xmodem over a null-modem lead between
> two PCs and see how far you get before you spend the 10
> minutes or so following some guide to setup PXE booting...
>

What I think would useful would be a bootable ISO image you could
download and burn to CD that would provide a TFTP/DHCP/anonymous
FTP/NFS ROOT/NFS/SSH environment for you.

(I actually started working on this idea about 6 months ago but I
didn't get very far.)

What I envision would be a bootable CD image (and/or bootable
thumbdrive image) that would drop you into a full screen ncurses (menu
driven) console where you could configure the network settings for
your particular setup.

You could have a memory mount point where you could download files to
memory that would be needed for the installation of the OS onto the
Soekris.  Like to install Debian, you would download the
netboot.tar.gz file and unarchive it to the memory mount point and
make the necessary changes.  (And the downloading of this file could
be a single menu option within the CD/thumbdrive image.)  Or to
install OpenBSD, you download the bsd.rd and pxeboot to the memory
mount point.  (Again, the CD/thumbdrive image could have scripting to
make downloading those files a simple as a menu selection.)  (And the
CD/thumbdrive image could even come with the latest version of
netboot.tar.gz for Debian installs, or bsd.rd and pxeboot for OpenBSD
installs.  Of course as those versions changed, so too would this
theoretical CD/thumbdrive image need to change.)

And of course the CD should come with minicom and the serial port
module enabled (and the USB to Serial port module also) so you could
get console access to the Soekris box on a virtual terminal.  ALT+F2
for example.

So basically, with a single downloadable image, you would have
everything you would need to setup a new Soekris box without making
any changes to your laptop/desktop system.

I personally think this would be extremely useful.  And if I knew just
a *little* more, I would have already created it myself.