Some work I've been doing recently has led me to make a minature
'distribution' of NetBSD that fits on a single 1.44MB floppy. The system
itself is designed to be a firewall or router, currently Ethernet only. It
can be configured to do remote logging (syslog), RIP (routed), DHCP/bootp
relaying etc. This is even more minimal than PicoBSD or the Linux Router
Project, in that there is currently no potential to login or maintain it
online.

It occured to me that an 'easily' configured router that provides feedback
would be a nice way to increase NetBSD's user-base (and be a good use for
those 80486s in the corner :). This also set me thinking further; with
PicoBSD and comparable things generally you have to configure the system
and then type 'make' to produce a floppy image which you write out. This
sorta sucks.

So, taking things like Intel Device View (which is admittedly a mess) into
consideration, wouldn't it be nice if you could build your router and
configure it online (or the image) with a GUI interface? Think of curses,
Gtk+ or (where's my flamesuit) Win32.

I see this working if you keep ??kB at the end of the disk image for a
simple, tar like archive. Upon startup, this could be extracted over the
MFS to provide configuration; if you make changes, the device reboots
(re-executes /etc/rc).

Has there been/is there an attempt to do something similar with NetBSD?
What do people think?

- ad