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We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure - Mullvad VPN (mullvad.net)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Just for my understanding when they boot such a server, where does it get it's operating system from? Over the network from a different computer which has a hard drive or some read only ROM on the server or what?

[–] UFO64 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This can be handled a few different ways.

You can boot from a HDD and then just not ever write data back to it. This would be the most trivial solution, and it's something people do with their Pi's a lot to avoid SD card failure.
You could network boot, pull the OS from the network at startup. Fun fact, this is how some rockets fly! No onboard persistent storage needed. Everything boots into and runs from ram the whole 10 ish minutes of operation.
You COULD do a ROM as you suggested, but that's a LOT of ROM. Seems odd to do imho.

[–] uis 5 points 1 year ago

16MiB is enough to hold entire Linux distro. Example: OpenWRT

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I remember that there was a ROM in the Amiga 500 which had the kickstart software on it which you'd load from a diskette on the predecessor the Amiga 1000. This made it much faster to boot because you would not need to switch diskettes in the middle of the boot.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Click the first link in the article, in the older post they talk about their stboot bootloader. It does what you suspect, loads the OS image from a different computer which has signed base images.