[asterisk-users] Live CD - do you think they are worth doing?

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 11:10:52AM -0500, jon pounder wrote:
> Randy R wrote:
> 
> I might try a live cd once or twice, or use it to boot a dead computer 
> or one that is not mine, BUT for anything with any sort of time 
> investment in settings to try anything you lose it all with a live cd so 
> why bother since if you can't try it all in one session, you have to 
> start over.

"Saving" is not trivial on such systems, given that you actually work on
a system where changes are written to a ramdisk. There are ways to save
your state (or some of it).

However the writable storage also allowed us in our live CD to save some
minimal configuration on the media. We have a CD version and a "USB"
version of our live system, which are basically the same. The system
configures a working Asterisk server with a web interface and a ssh
server. Those two use some default user and password (which are
hard-wired - after-all, some remote user has to use them, and we don't
want to assume there's a local user at the keyboard).

If the system sees a certain file on the media, it will take the
username and password from there. With the CD version this won't help
you much, as you won't remaster it just to set a password. But with the
USB version - just create a simple file with a text editor, and you're
done.

> 
> Live usb sticks are another matter (assuming your bios actually reliably 
> boots them) at least you can save your changes and pickup where you left 
> off the next time.
>

Just about any recent system now can boot from USB. There are quite a
few systems now that don't have a CD. However explaining to a lay person
how to boot from USB tends to be more complicated than explaining how to
boot from a CD.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
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