[Soekris] net4801 and hard drives

[Matt Lawrence]

On Thu, 23 Nov 2006, Bill Maas wrote:

> A few years ago I managed to extract a fully-fledged RedHat 7.3
> text-mode only server install from all the blah that RedHat wanted to
> put onto my disk. Which was indeed tedious manual labour, because I
> wanted to do it without breaking dependencies, so I wouldn't have to use
> the rpm -f option while installing. With RH 7.1 I succeeded, but with RH
> 7.3 it failed because printer support required fonts which required X11
> which requires .... (repeat until system runs KDE || GNOME || both).

By using a kickstart file, I've been able to shrink a CentOS4 install to 
well less than 300MB.  Still rather large.  I've been told that RHEL5 will 
have a much smaller "minimal" install, so I'm anxiously awaiting CentOS5.

> The RH "minimal install", packed into a compressed tarball, was then 43
> MB. But it's not only size that matters here: RPM has an incredible lot
> to do before it ever gets to actually copying the files. And then there
> is your network throughput of course, and the fact that writing to a CF
> card is slooooowwwwww (assuming that you are using a CF card).

rpm isn't too bad, but the version of yum from that era are really, really 
slow.  The author has managed to do some major speed improvements in the 
more recent versions.

> Anyway, I can't imagine that you really need 1.5 GB of RH/Fedora install
> on your Soekris. Maybe switch to some OS that doesn't assume that you
> are going for the graphical desktop on a 2 GHz PC?;)

I'm running CentOS4 on my net4801 and using it as a firewall/router.  You 
are right that there are smaller distributions that are a better choice, 
but I've standardized on CentOS here at the house and wanted to continue 
using it.  The log files tend do get rather large with all the malware out 
on the net.

-- Matt
It's not what I know that counts. 
It's what I can remember in time to use.