Network boot from SAFE images

[bluebird]

Hi,

I’m a bit hesitant to describe something that seems obvious after stating it, but:

I see no reason why it wouldn’t possible to boot devices from an OS image kept on the SAFE network. When powered on, a device’s built-in operating system (BIOS) does some health checks and then looks in mass storage, or in some cases on the local network, for the operating system, and then loads it. But that network could be the SAFE network.

For IoT devices, the boot image might include an initial database for it to do its job and to find sibling devices.

For bigger systems, such as general purpose computers (which, of course, can be as small as a Raspberry Pi), it depends on how long you want to wait for it to boot. I imagine though that in a situation where you have a population of such devices, such a boot image might be downloaded once and then cached locally perhaps on the first peer to boot…

[neo]

Found 3 topics in a search for this.

Ubuntu as a SAFE OS (boot directly from SAFE)

I’m wondering about the value to SAFE Network of using Ubuntu as the basis of SAFE OS, or Snappy Ubuntu (see article) in devices such as ePlug. I’m not sure it’s the way to go, but interested because Ubuntu might gain widespread IoT adoption of Snappy, and how this might help SAFE.

Booting from maidsafe as a drive

Just wondering if it would be possible to upload say a .iso of an OS and boot a machine that loads the OS from the safe network as some sort of external/virtual/encrypted drive. Imagine running all programs from within the network and saving the files directly to the network! Is this just wishful thinking or might a scenario like this be feasible?? Or perhaps some sort of VPS…

Could you boot the majority of a computer using Maidsafe data?

(So basically, not just documents, movies, etc., but much more important files, system files, etc. This might get a bit interwoven with many different topics, considering I feel like I’m thinking of novel ideas here all feeding off each other.) Do I even know what I’m talking about? Maybe not. I’m not entirely certain how a computer even boots. Obviously hardware is needed, not just software. Basically I’m wondering about how to reduce the amount of local data needed for running OS’s. This woul…

[bluebird]

Thank you. I hate searching because it dampens my apparent brilliance.

[janitor]

And the net boot image would be your own (i.e. for your desktop, you’d upload a Tails ISO, for your phone maybe an Android boot image, and so on, one for each model of each device), I presume?

Last time I checked each was few hundred MB or more. You’d better reboot often to keep them cached so that you don’t have to wait 10 mins every time you power up. Or longer, if you’re away from the network.