In message <20030506140054.26f83b7a.dokas@cs.umn.edu>, Paul Dokas writes:
>I've aquired an old Lucent Brick 80 that's basically a 486 class PC with
>CompactFlash instead of a disk drive and 4 Intel based NICs that I'd like
>to get working as a firewall.

Whee!  I've done something similar.

>What I think is the best approach is to get a trimmed down version of
>NetBSD onto the CF that is similar to the installation floppies.  Basically,
>the CF would hold a kernel that mounts and populates a memory disk (md(4))
>in the same sort of way that the installation floppies do.  However, I'm
>having a little trouble figuring out exactly how to build such a thing.

I have *not* done that.  I just mounted a CF card read-only and noatime, then
mounted mfs filesystems in places where I need to write files.

My understanding is that the md device just takes an image which looks like
any other filesystem image - you make it with dd from /dev/zero, vnconfig it,
and newfs /dev/vnd0c.

-s