On Thu, 16 May 1996 is@beverly.rhein.de wrote:

> VaX#n8 (vax@linkdead.paranoia.com) wrote:
> : I want to set up a ppp demand-dialing firewall on a spare box here.
> : 
> : It would save me immense effort if someone could list out the very
> : minimum number of files I will need on a root partition to run it.
> : 
> : Has anyone done this before?
> : 
> : Ideally, it would all fit on a single 1.44MB (read-only) root disk.
> 
> Thats a tough one.
> 
> When I prepared a minimalist 386 as a router for two dedicated ppp
> lines, we had 386/40, 5 MB of RAM, 40 MB of some old MFM disk.
> 
> I "just installed", using 30 MB for / and 10 MB for swap; then installed
> etc10 (later etc11) and bin10 (later bin11). we had about 10 MB left for
> logfiles. 
> 
> Regards,
> 	Ignatios Souvatzis
I had wanted to do this and was thinking of setting up a bootable 
diskless system.  The idea was that staff people who have an office PC with
modem and are connected to eithernet and use Windows durring the day
could put in a floppy and reboot their computer with the floppy in when they 
leave the office and could have a dedicated internet ppp link from home.

The disk and swap space could be allocated via nfs to some NetBSD server.

I just did not have time to try to implement it. 

I did ask and someone responded that the `squeeze' program was available
in the source under (I think) distrib.  This program takes a bunch of
programs and makes them into one file and aparently checks the command
argument and dispaches to the appropiate program.  The advantage is that
these programs can be staticly linked but only 1 copy of the libraires are
in this file which should take up less disk space. Each 'program' is a
link to this one group of programs. This is one trick to get more stuff on
the floppy. 

Note: this information is by casual observation as opposed to actually
actually using the code and may be off. 

johnh...