Re: Demo System...

Awhile ago I used LiveCD (http://livecd.sourceforge.net/) to build a CDROM
running FreeBSD, Apache, PHP, and PostgreSQL. It created memory based
file systems for things that needed writing too.

Worked fine. It's a little slow the first time you do anything since it
reads off the CD, but after that it was quite speedy.

The two things that got me (on freebsd at least) were that you couldn't
use vipw cause vipw tries to create a file in / which I didn't have in
memory (I think you can, but I didn't). Not a big deal since it's a CDROM
so as soon as you reboot you lose the change, but for my goofing around it
bugged me for a bit until I burned a new CD with the right stuff.

The other thing was that the default options to mkisofs (to make the CD
image) don't keep the setuid bits on executables by default which if you
do everything as root isn't a problem, but if you don't drives you crazy
when "su" keeps saying "Sorry".

As for testing latest versions of postgres, the trick would be you'd need
another machine to install it onto and then burn it onto a cd... so why
not just use that machine in the first place? I guess you could install
it, but not initdb it and just do that all in ram once the thing is
booted...

-philip

On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Ian Harding wrote:

> I have been interested in "bootable all in-RAM" distributions of open
> source unix-like operating systems because they are a way to "Stick it
> to The Man" and run my favorite operating system on The Man's system.
>
> However, I have another thought. It is theoretically possible to create
> one of these things with a PostgreSQL server (and clients) on it. Why?
> To test drive beta or more-current-than-what-you-have-installed versions
> without dedicating a machine to it or to demonstrate the system to
> someone who doesn't want to dedicate a machine to it.
>
> What got me thinking this way was the fact that I am slow to upgrade
> because I rely on a package system that is not always updated all that
> quickly, but I would like to preview the latest versions.
>
> Has anyone already done this? Does it make sense?
>
> Ian Harding
> Programmer/Analyst II
> Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department
> iharding(at)tpchd(dot)org
> (253) 798-3549
>
>
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