(How many folks keep a box of fresh, new diskettes around specifically for new revisions of ONTAP? How many just grab the first N unassigned floppies they see laying around their desk? How many use one floppy and re-image it on-the-fly as the filer asks for it? :)
What we need is a gizmo like those cheesy "fake cassette tapes" that let you plug a portable CD player into the crappy old tape deck in your '83 Datsun. You know, the old pickup you just can't let go of, with the kicked in speaker that buzzes on the passenger side door, most of the wiring held together with black tape after you grudgingly replaced the old 8-track player. "Fercryinoutloud, one upgrade is enough! All this newfangled technology... now I have to go buy ANOTHER copy of the White Album." [1]
Yes, we need a floppy with a little cable that pops out and plugs into your laptop, so you can run a downloader program that spoofs the read heads and lets you feed all four floppy images without the swapping. THAT would be cool.
Of course, just typing "boot net" at the OpenBoot PROM, just like you can on every Sun built in the last decade, would be less funky but infinitely more useful. Or there's the whole "boot cdrom" thing. Those options are much more attractive to folks who don't want their data center looking like the set from "Brazil". I'm still lobbying for SNMP-managed lava lamps and a disco ball, but you know, IT budgets what they are these days...
-- Chris
[1] To paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black.
-- Chris Lamb, Unix Guy MeasureCast, Inc. 503-241-1469 x247 skeezics@measurecast.com