“Those of you who have been following the evolution of my
floppy-based Linux gateway in the August and October columns have
probably noticed I have been squeezing just about as much onto a
1440K floppy disk as was humanly possible. The gateway disk is now
full, yet I still want to add features, such as a caching name
server and a small Web server. Yet the elegance of booting from
a floppy is indisputable — your OS can’t be hacked, the floppy is
write protected, and a push of the reset button puts a clean
version of Linux up again.“
“I wanted to add a caching name server, BIND, to the original
gateway software, but there was no way I could make available the
extra 160K of floppy space needded for that executable. BIND caches
name requests, and greatly reduces the latency when fetching pages
from frequently visited sites. Additionally, it is no longer
necessary to have two name servers programmed into each of the PCs
on the network. Each PC points at the gateway (192.168.1.1) for its
DNS server, and BIND does the rest.”