No, the floppy disk is not dead

My staging servers cannot boot from CD-ROM, therefore I use a boot disk. For this reason alone, I have floppy drives in all my systems. I also save time by booting from floppy disk and installing operating systems over the network. A tip for anyone who's looking to become RHCE certified: install RHEL using a network connection because it's much, much faster than installing via CD and it saves precious time during your performance based exam.

How does this impact the security of your systems? How does this affect available network bandwidth? Ideally, we don't want to introduce more entry points into our systems than we need, be it via USB drive, floppy, or CD-ROM. Which do you prefer, or do you even care?

Posted by Marcin on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 in Security and Tech.