On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 22:11:02 +0100, Ben Harris wrote:

> > What I think is the best approach is to get a trimmed down version of
> > NetBSD onto the CF that is similar to the installation floppies.
> 
> This sounds a pretty similar beast to the Soekris net4501.  What I did with
> my net4501 was just to use a 128 MB CF card, which is big enough to hold the
> whole of base.tgz with plenty of room to spare.  About the only changes I've
> made to allow for root being on CF is to mount root noatime,nodevmtime and
> to have no swap (with 64 MB of RAM, who needs it?).  With bash and djbdns
> installed from pkgsrc, I've still got 29 MB free:
[...] 
> It's not a particularly clever approach, but it works for me.

For the Dover that routes my cable connection I used syspkg lists to
trim down stuff I don't need so I was able to fit into 32MB CF without
breaking a sweat.  I thought about using a 15MB CF first (as I already
had some), but that would require engaging the brain to select
binaries on a more fine-grained basis.

# df -k
Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a       31407    25318      4518    84%    /

That is with three months of logs written locally b/c I'm still too
lazy/busy to direct syslog to another machine ;).  It's still its
first write cycle, so I'm don't bother...

The installat is, effectively, base with some of the "obviously"
unnecessary (for my needs) stuff removed (like base-bootserver-bin,
base-nfsclient-bin etc).  Hopefully when syspkgs are really integrated
doing this sort of customization will be very easy.  For now I just
used a trivial grep | awk | xargs rm -r over $DESTDIR using files in
distrib/sets/lists/* as input.

With current CF prices, I'd say throwing just some more $currency at
the problem is the path of least resistent for a one time installation
(i.e. something that you are not going to do in large numbers when
price might have a greater weight in the time/money equation).  So the
easiest thing is to do what Ben did and just don't waste time and
effort on it (unless you want to beat Jason's 4MB in this CF size war :).

SY, Uwe
-- 
uwe@ptc.spbu.ru                         |       Zu Grunde kommen
http://www.ptc.spbu.ru/~uwe/            |       Ist zu Grunde gehen